


Transubstantiation

by audikatia



Category: Raven Cycle - Maggie Stiefvater
Genre: Abuse, Alternate Universe, Alternate Universe - Coffee Shops & Cafés, Alternate Universe - Serial Killers, Blood and Gore, Blow Jobs, Body Horror, Catholicism, Dismemberment, First Time, Horror, M/M, Minor Character Death, Murder, Mutilation, Religious Imagery & Symbolism, Romance, Sexual Content, Slow Burn, Substance Abuse, Trauma, Violence
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2021-02-15
Updated: 2021-03-14
Packaged: 2021-03-16 09:28:19
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 5
Words: 35,397
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/29451555
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/audikatia/pseuds/audikatia
Summary: Whatever it was Adam expected out of life, it wasn’t this. It wasn’t a series of dead end part time jobs, a shitty apartment over a church, endless night classes at a local university, a life one town over from the loveless trailer park he grew up in. He definitely did not expect the body outside his apartment and the spiderweb of horrors involving mutilated corpses, strange unmarked boxes, and ominous phone calls. And then there’s Ronan Lynch, local farmer and personal nuisance, a sudden support against the fresh hell that has become Adam’s life. Stuck in this new landscape fraught with religious grotesquery in a pattern only he seems to see, Adam must find the killer before he too becomes the sick part of a sick thing.
Relationships: Ronan Lynch/Adam Parrish
Comments: 59
Kudos: 59





	1. Chapter One

**Author's Note:**

> Finally, the Catholic Serial Killer AU no one asked for. I started this back in November for Nanowrimo and it's been a fucking blast. This is a truly self-indulgent piece and I feel better writing this than I have in years. Basically, this is me working through my own Catholic upbringing and this fic is a breakdown of "look how fucked up this religion is and the way we bend the basic concept of 'love is stitched into every aspect of being' into really fucked up ways to justify brutality."
> 
> I have the first ten chapters written and am working my way through editing and writing more each week, and I plan on posting a new chapter every Sunday. However, it is a pandemic so that might change, who knows lol

**Chapter 1 (Friday morning, October 6)**

Adam Parrish could barely keep his eyes open.

This was not a new or unusual occurrence in Adam’s daily life. He was used to the weight over his eyelids, the pressure in his temples, the constant strum of _no more, please_ running sluggishly through him as he moved through his day. He had recently learned the term “sleep debt” in some article his friend and co-worker Noah Czerny had not so casually left out for him to see. That was him, he thought, racking up more and more hours on a charge he could not afford, turning exhaustion into years-long acts of transgression against his body. Today was nothing new.

Except, no, today had been different. Today he had woken up to a bird in his apartment rustling noisily in the cramped corner of his single room and ripping the corner of his cardboard box-turned-nightstand for its own gain. He had been irritated, not just at the damaged box or the thought of droppings somewhere in his space, but at the sight of the clock telling him he still had twenty minutes of sleep the bird had taken from him. He had tried to roll over to press his hearing ear into his thin pillow, but even if the rustling noise had been muffled, the knowledge of the bird in his space kept Adam’s eyes awake. Sighing heavily, he had blearily swung his legs out of bed, his exposed ankles under the frayed hem of his pajamas instantly cold in the sudden chill of morning air.

The bird had darted out innocently enough, its movements too quick and small for Adam to catalogue its features as anything but blue and red-breasted, its beak a sharp gleam as it disappeared into the nebulous morning sky. Adam had watched for one, two, three precious moments until the bird was lost to him before closing the door and giving up on his last few minutes of sleep in favor of preparing for the day. No droppings could be found, a small blessing he supposed, but neither could his apron for his first job of the day.

It was hardly a significant problem, but it was eating away at Adam to know he had lost his apron. The one-room apartment over St. Agnes Church was too small to truly ever lose anything, and Adam could have sworn he had brought it back from his last laundry trip a few days prior, its creamy linen still holding the homemade detergent scent from his best friend Blue Sargent’s family home at 300 Fox Way. But it could not be found and, all too soon, those minutes gained by his early morning bird alarm were lost to his frustrated search. Eventually he had arrived at the Busy Bee Café, sleep worn and feeling exposed without the protection of his apron.

Adam pulled himself away from fatigue and lingering embarrassment by digging the nail of his right hand into the inside of his left wrist, a sharp sensation just between barely visible veins that did a passable job at pulling away at the edges of his exhaustion. He looked down at himself now where he sat on an errant stool in the café, his hands folded and fingers shuffled together over his borrowed apron from Blue. She had had a spare, one she had been working on in her free time, she explained as she handed it to him. Tiny frogs, no bigger than an inch, were embroidered around the bottom of the apron. He could see she had started on the left side, carefully making her way to the right with big, loopy green stitches turned into wonky, asymmetrical frogs on lilypads that slowly morphed into something a little more refined. The frogs on the right were a little neater, their eyes a little rounder, their shapes a little more recognizable. He had half a mind to tell her the frogs on the right were like little Disney frogs, but he could already anticipate her scowl and her moves to take out the stitches of the pleasantly cute frogs just to make them as crooked and distinctive as her first frogs.

He pressed his nail to his wrist again.

“Adam, should I offer my deepest apologies to you, having disturbed your daydreaming with my pesky business?”

Henry Cheng sounded so stern that the “No, sir” nearly slipped out of Adam’s mouth on instinct. But he caught himself at the last minute, the thought of Noah and Blue’s mirrored smirks if he talked to Henry that way stopping him.

“Sorry,” he settled for instead. He could see easily that the admonishment did not run deep through Henry, it never did, but still the lingering embarrassment from earlier spread back over him. It never left him for long.

“It’s fine,” Henry said dismissively, a single flourish of his hand wiping Adam’s apology out of the air between them like a pesky fly before coming to unnecessarily smooth back his gloriously spiked hair.

Beside him, smudgy Noah knocked him gently with his elbow, and on his other side, Blue not-so-gently rammed her ripped-jean exposed knee against his. Adam ignored Noah’s whispered “are you okay” in favor of sitting up a little straighter, setting his shoulders a little tighter.

“As I was saying,” Henry continued because it was clear to Adam now that he really had been saying something and that the white noise ringing in his ears before had in fact been Henry, “this is our time. So many people did not believe in us when I believed in us. So many people doubted us and motivated us every single day to be who we are. We have had our bad days, but we have always gotten back up. We have been through the toughest times as a family, but we are still standing. Regardless of the situation, regardless of the unrelenting customers, we are going to be successful because we put in all the time, all the effort, all the hard work, and you know that it’s going to pay off.”

“Did he just Google sports pep talks?” Noah whispered into Adam’s ear. Still smarting from Henry’s reprimand, Adam did not acknowledge Noah’s words, but it was clear to him that that was exactly what Henry had done.

“It’s okay to cry,” Henry went on, glaring at Noah who only absorbed the look without shame. “It’s going to be a hard season out there for us as we work tirelessly to provide for our community. But we will make it through this Pumpkin Spice Latte season.”

And with a final, solemn expression, Henry bowed his head reverently to Adam, Blue, and Noah, his scant employees in the otherwise empty café. As if on cue, the morning wind outside picked up scattered leaves on the sidewalk just outside the door of the Busy Bee Café as if to remind them autumn had settled down around their little town of Henrietta, Virginia and was not leaving anytime soon.

“Oh god.” Blue let out an unintelligible note of deep irritation. “Does that start today?” Her spiky hair seemed to visibly deflate from its mass of brightly colored hair clips flashing through the dark strands as she glanced over at the daily menu. Henry’s tidy and flourished handwriting announced “PSL Season Is Here!” on the chalkboard on the countertop, its cheeriness an assault to Adam’s memory of last year’s horror show masquerading as PSL season.

“It starts as soon as our nutmeg delivery arrives.” Henry shrugged, his voice no longer the passionate boom of a high school football coach and instead its usual careless elegance of a small bee-themed café owner as he momentarily disappeared behind the counter.

Adam, Noah, and Blue all exchanged a single, muted glance between one another before they released a sigh and rose from their stools as one like a deeply long-suffering Greek chorus. Adam maneuvered around Noah and Blue to return the stools to their rightful place under the counter, trying to discreetly tug at the ends of his borrowed apron. Blue, significantly shorter than Adam, had hemmed her apron to accommodate her own stature and Adam felt out of place without those last few inches of fabric above his knees.

 _No one else can tell_ , he reminded himself, _no one else cares._ He tugged at the apron again.

“In the meantime,” Henry chimed, his loftily spiked dark hair reemerging from behind the cash register as he rose with boxes in his arms, “hang these lights. The Harvest Festival is in a few weeks, and I will literally kill myself if Cheng2’s decorations are better than mine this year. I also got fabric pumpkins. Martha Stewart swears by them and I trust that bitch like no other when it comes to home decor.”

“This isn’t a home,” Adam remarked, watching as Noah pulled out a spool of twinkle lights from the depths of the box.

Henry took no offense to Adam’s comment and instead looked at him appraisingly. Adam’s hands itched to pull at the apron, to touch the unraveling thread of his shirt around his collar. Then Adam realized Henry was instead looking at the window just behind him, dark eyes skimming clinically before reaching into the box and pulling out a felted pumpkin. Its non-traditional yellow color matched the sunny bees on the accent wallpaper and the fluffy curtains hanging over the box window. It was thrust into Adam’s hands, scratchier against his palms than he had expected. “Go put this one over there.”

Adam moved to where Henry had vaguely gestured, debating if he should swap out the ceramic bee on the window sill in favor of the felted pumpkin or if they should remain together. The Harvest Festival was a point of pride in Henrietta, one of the largest tourist attractions of the year and an altogether quaint tradition. Nondenominational celebrations that centered around pumpkins, colorful leaves, and cinnamon-flavored foods that were normally not cinnamon-flavored seemed to appeal to many people, and Adam could not stop himself from wanting to present the café in a favorable light. It seemed important to Henry and as much as Henry made Adam want to tear his hair out most days, he was not entirely sure Henry would not go through on his threat of dramatic suicide by shame, and he would miss Henry’s company more than he was willing to actually admit.

“I still don’t know why you’re so concerned with sales,” Adam called over his shoulder as he arranged the autumnal decorations. He tried to tap down the surge of resentment he felt towards his boss. It wasn’t Henry’s fault he had been born to money and the whimsy that came from disposable income. It wasn’t Henry’s fault that he had the luxury of being able to open a café on a whim because the aesthetic of being a café owner in a small town appealed to him. It wasn’t Henry’s fault if the success or failure of the café was little more than a blip on his radar.

“This is my baby,” Henry surged dramatically. Adam didn’t have to look to know Henry was giving him a wounded look. “I know my baby will survive a little cold but I still get concerned when it coughs.”

A silence fell over the tiny café before Blue managed a single note of disdain in an otherwise flat voice. “That’s the worst analogy I’ve ever heard.”

Noah gave a laugh behind the twinkle lights he had successfully managed to tangle to ruins near the entrance. Henry didn’t waste a wounded look at Noah, Adam noticed, but instead watched Blue haughtily as she prepped the machines in anticipation for their morning ahead.

“It’s not even six in the morning and I had to get up at four to prepare my hair,” he explained as though his analogies were typically better when he had gotten more sleep. They were not.

“Why decide to open a café if you don’t even like mornings?” Adam let out, careful to keep his tone light and teasing instead giving way to the frustration that had originally inspired the statement.

Henry was saved the chance to answer for his lack of forethought when developing his life plans by a violent jangle at the door.

Adam identified the source of the noise even before it emerged through the doorway, the lock immediately undone by an eager Noah. He turned despite his better judgement and could see Henry and Blue do the same, one dark head nearly vibrating with excitement and the other weaving between the machines with movements Adam could only describe as _with ill-intent_.

“What the shit, man?” Ronan Lynch drawled with insolence, his presence a dark streak in the doorway, too sharp to be a smudge, too solid to be a shadow. “Trying to lock me out?”

From his shoulder, his hulking pet raven cawed dolefully at Henry as if she, too, had been grievously offended by the locked door. A gleaming, glistening creature named Chainsaw, she was a perfect stamp to Ronan’s idly threatening form.

“I expect no miracles from manmade devices,” Henry replied flippantly looking between Ronan and the door handle in question. “I’m sure you would have found a way in.”

Ronan shrugged the shoulder not bearing the weight of his bird, the plastic bags laden in his arms rustling with the casual movement.

“I could have thrown a rock through the window but Parrish would probably get pissy if I messed up his face.”

It wasn’t until Ronan’s icy eyes moved to face him head on that Adam remembered he was still holding the felted pumpkin. He felt Ronan take in his image, a nasty smile spread over his face as he spied the pumpkin. Too tired to be bothered with Ronan’s immaturity, Adam merely raised an eyebrow before turning back to the window ledge.

He felt Ronan’s eyes on him for a beat, knowing he wanted Adam to rise to the bait. When Adam gave him no such satisfaction, he moved to Henry, arm outstretched to hand him the plastic bag full of what Adam assumed was the promised nutmeg delivery.

“Here’s your shit.”

“And here’s your shit,” Blue piped up from the counter. Her tiny hand slammed down a lidded coffee with unnecessary force, her face slashed by a lock of dark hair obstinately fallen across her forehead.

“Great service, maggot,” Ronan sneered, snagging the coffee from the counter and taking an artless swig of his usual large cold brew with three shots. The leather bands corded around his wrist slipped down towards his elbow in a graceful descent.

“I spit in it, too. Just the way you like it.” Blue’s Barbie-sweet voice was at odds with the knife-edge gleam in her eyes. From his corner, Noah let out a hum of laughter, delighted as ever by Blue’s unusual charm.

“God, you’re such a stereotype, Lynch,” Henry declared, his eyes barely tearing away from Blue’s hardened stance to glare at the coffee cup with a curled lip. Adam wondered for a moment what flavor Blue had added to the mess. He assumed it passed whatever test Ronan seemed to judge taste on, an as-of-yet unknown scale that baffled Adam and most likely God himself.

The bell sounded at the door, a much less violent entrance than Ronan’s own, and a broad-shouldered man entered with a teal sweater that complemented the polished design of the café so well it was as though he had been tailor made for it. His handsome face swept the room before landing on Ronan’s sharp angles.

“Ronan,” he addressed him pleasantly, “why in the fresh hell did you throw the trash can directly in my path? I thought the plan was for us to come in together?”

Ronan had no answer except to say, “I thought it would be funny. And I was right.”

Gansey mulled this over before nodding once. “I had to stay behind and clean up your mess.”

Adam privately thought Ronan was better served to clean up his own messes, but kept those words to himself. As though his secret thoughts had been a beacon to Gansey’s attention, Gansey’s moderate expression turned to him with something bright and winsome in his cheeks. This time, Adam could not stop himself from tugging at the ends of his, Blue’s, apron.

“Ah! Gansey!” Henry trilled as the man shifted his dimples from Adam to bump fists with Noah congenially. “Please, raise the quality of my customers with a superior order.”

“Oh,” Gansey said, a bit taken aback to have the entire café’s occupants’ attention on him, but taking it in stride. Adam had only officially met Gansey once before, but he was quick to realize Gansey took nearly everything in stride. Adam watched with a low-simmering jealousy at Gansey’s immediate ease under the attention as he smiled broadly at Blue. “I’m not much of a coffee drinker, I’m afraid. I’ll defer to the masters in this area.”

Adam was perversely pleased to see Blue respond to such blatant charm with her usual level of suspicion and tried to hide his smile as he pulled yet more pumpkins from the cardboard boxes Henry had deposited on the tiny tabletops around them. Adam wasn’t sure if it was Gansey’s old money-ed look of evenly tanned skin even in autumn, his winsome vote-for-me smile, or his indecently peppy attitude in a morning hour that by all rights should not exist that prompted Blue’s immediate scorn.

It was probably his boat shoes, he decided.

“It’s coffee,” she deadpanned at Gansey, whose posture wilted just barely under her even keeled gaze. “Just pick something.”

“Perhaps your special?” Gansey offered, one tick on the wrong side of magnanimous. Adam saw Blue all but gnash her teeth together as Gansey glanced at Henry’s handwritten sign. “Oh, a pumpkin spice latte? Isn’t that the drink all those teenage girls like? I think I’ll pass.”

It was a bit like watching a train wreck, Adam thought.

As Blue lit into Gansey about how mocking women, especially young women, for enjoying pumpkin spiced foods was a transparent stand-in for hating women who enjoy themselves in ways that have nothing to do with pleasing men, everyone else gave them space.

Adam supposed it was a bit hypocritical. Just minutes before, Blue had been as irritated as anyone else by the promise of customers ordering pumpkin spice with a rampant frenzy unparalleled to any other specialty flavor they offered throughout the year. But mentioning this now seemed unreasonably foolish, and he busied himself with the last of the pumpkins added to the window sill. Morning light was barely seeping through the sky, warming the colors of the felted pumpkins in a way that made him begrudgingly agree with Henry that they were a nice touch.

Behind him, Gansey made a noise like he wanted to interrupt Blue, and Adam winced. He saw Noah move from his perch near the door, twinkle lights abandoned as he moved closer to the chaos between Blue and Gansey. Taken by Gansey though Noah certainly was, his friendship with Blue was unwavering in their shared adoration for each other. If the argument escalated, there was as much chance of Noah siding with Blue as there was of Noah fanning the flames.

Gansey, Adam reckoned, could handle his own. After all, one could not be self-proclaimed best friends with Ronan Lynch for years without some fortitude against willful personalities. In the last fifteen months that Adam had been working at the Busy Bee Café, Ronan had been an inconsistent but irritating presence. A former classmate of Henry’s from their high school days, a reminder that felt like acid in the pits of Adam’s stomach, Ronan was now a local farmer.

Gansey is the reason Ronan even bothers to come here, Henry had said once after a particularly colorful delivery from Ronan that had involved the usual free-range chicken eggs, goat cheese, and a slew of curses Adam had never heard come from someone in a single breath. Apparently Gansey, unseen and tucked away at graduate school at the time, had been particularly supportive of Ronan’s farming and knew Henry’s penchant for using local goods in his products. Adam had wondered then how this supportive friend who had apparently pitched the idea of Ronan selling his farm goods to Henry with the line, “Ronan, you know who would love those eggs your chickens lay?” could live in tandem with Ronan’s more acerbic manners. When Gansey had arrived with Ronan’s delivery the previous month, freshly graduated with his Master’s and a summer internship with the National Archives under his belt with the promise of coming back to town to be the local historian, Adam’s questions had continued to go unanswered.

Adam was jolted back to the café when his eyes caught Chainsaw’s sudden movement as she flapped heartily from Ronan’s shoulder to the cardboard box, now devoid of felted pumpkins. She nestled in almost cat-like, beak poking investigatively at the packaging still lining the bottom.

“You know,” Adam started dryly, pulling Ronan’s attention away from his bird who was making increasingly loud noises from the depths of the box, “you really can’t bring carrion birds inside a place that sells food.”

“Jesus,” Ronan breathed with his own brand of unfiltered irritation, “what are you, a broken record?

This was not the first time they had this conversation. Adam assumed it would not be the last.

“These aren’t my rules,” he reminded Ronan, “they are state laws.”

Ronan gave an elegant raise of a single eyebrow, the dark arc inching towards the bristled hairline of his shaved head.

“Food code violations, at least,” Adam amended, internally hating himself for allowing Ronan’s wordless stare to change his words.

Ronan’s eyes slid off him coolly with this concede and gave another one-shouldered shrug as if to say those were petty concerns beneath him. He tossed the rest of his abysmal coffee down his throat, and Adam watched the line of his neck as he swallowed before Ronan lazily slid the cardboard holder off his coffee cup to offer it to Chainsaw.

She cawed appreciatively from her box, because it was certainly hers now, and immediately began ripping it to shreds.

“Well,” Henry said, his voice raised slightly to be heard over both Blue’s continually admonishing tones and Chainsaw’s enthusiastic tearing, “I own the café, and I say it’s fine because Chainsaw is my friend.”

“I doubt that will hold up as an excuse to the food inspector.” Adam rolled his eyes. Why did he even care? It wasn’t his business that would be shut down if a health inspector ever saw Chainsaw in the café. Except that he would be the one to miss shifts if the café closed down before it could pass inspection again.

“Oh, they will think nothing of it,” Henry continued blithely, clearly not understanding Adam’s need to keep the coffee shop open as anything more than passing concern. “Chainsaw is the goodest girl. She is too pretty to be troublesome.”

Adam considered Ronan to be proof positive of the folly in Henry’s statement, but kept his mouth shut.

Ronan, however, saw the opportunity to make things worse, like he always did, and took that opportunity, like he always did. “What’s that, Parrish?” he said, his mouth forming the angle of a smile without any of its true nature. “You don’t think my bird is beautiful?”

Ronan held Adam’s gaze as competition, and Adam in turn looked back at Chainsaw still rustling good naturedly in the box. He supposed there was a dark glamour to her silken feathers and could remember times in the past when she had lifted from Ronan’s shoulder outside to become a striking black streak against a perfect expanse of blue sky. He wanted to refuse to admit this to Ronan, but Ronan smirked as though he understood anyway.

“Yes,” Adam sighed, caught between Ronan’s arrogant expression and Henry’s gleeful one, “she is the goodest girl, yes she is beautiful. That doesn’t mean she isn’t still a health code violation.”

Somehow, Ronan took this as victory, though Adam knew conclusively it was a draw at best. He moved with a surprising display of grace around Adam’s frame to toss the now-empty coffee cup in the trash can just behind him. From either the coffee cup or maybe even Ronan’s breath when he brushed past Adam, Adam caught a whiff of the artificial sweetness of peach. The mystery flavor Blue must have added, he realized. It was a flavor Henry had been pushing them to get rid of during the last stretch of September.

“I have apologized three times now.” Gansey’s honeyed Virginia accent was now colored by the slightest bit of indignation, and that more than anything else seemed to cut across the otherwise relative silence of the room.

“Four, actually,” Noah interjected, wiping messily at his cheek with the back of his hand like he was prone to do.

“Yes, thank you, Noah. Four times.” Gansey nodded at him in a conciliatory way before returning his attention to Blue. “I’m sorry you were offended on ‘behalf of women everywhere who only want to enjoy their seasonal drink in peace without ridicule,’ and I can concede that my own comment was flippant and dismissive at best and inherently misogynist at worst. I appreciate your insight into why my statement was unacceptable, and I will do my part to adjust my language in the future. There, that’s a fifth time. I don’t know what else to say.”

“Then just say bye,” Blue blithely commented, her little wave towards the door somehow as rude as if she had flipped him off and made a comment about his mother.

“Well.” Gansey started, his tone clipped with undiluted surprise. “Bye.”

He paused as if waiting for Noah to chime in again, but Noah looked at him as though to say correcting Gansey’s number of apologies was the most he was willing to do against Blue. Adam watched as though Gansey was shuffling himself back together like a deck of cards tapped against a tabletop. Within moments, he was back to his polished demeanor, unflappable in a way Adam had never been.

Ronan clearly took this as his cue to leave as well. His own body scuffed together, and he held out his arm to Chainsaw, who hopped obediently from the box she had dutifully shredded. He moved to the door, not even looking behind him to see if Gansey was following.

“Parrish,” Gansey addressed him as though Adam were an esteemed colleague or a golfing buddy, anything other than the passing acquaintance he really was. “I’m sorry we didn’t get a chance to talk more. Another time then, yeah?”

_Don’t touch your collar. Don’t touch the apron._

“Yeah,” Adam agreed, his voice unpracticed in its attempt to be as genuine as Gansey’s. He was careful to limit his words, to keep his own local accent from paling in comparison to Gansey’s.

Gansey held up a fist to Adam, a mimic of his action with Noah. Adam returned it, a performance of friendship, before Gansey offered a final wave to the room and left with Ronan.

Even as the door slammed behind them, bell clanging their dismissal, Adam could hear Ronan’s “Pumpkin spice ain’t shit anyway.”

As they walked away, Ronan’s face looked over his shoulder into the shop and caught Adam’s eye through the window. His immediate sneer was somehow more dismissive than cruel, a polished gesture even as Ronan brought the leather bands on his wrist to his mouth.

Adam pulled his eyes away to look at Chainsaw who stared beadily back at him. Her eyes were such an inky, bottomless black that Adam was somehow inexplicably reminded of the colorful bird in his apartment just hours ago.

“He’s not so bad.” Noah’s gently prodding brought him back to the café.

Adam opened his mouth to add his own commentary about Ronan when Blue’s huffy response made him realize they were talking about Gansey.

“He’s not so great,” she rebutted sulkily. Her pretty chin jutted out stubbornly and childishly, her flower mouth in a pansy pout. She flicked her eyes to Henry as though looking for confirmation.

Never one to want to disappoint Blue, Henry said nothing but his expression explained that they would have to agree to disagree.

If she had been defensive from Noah’s appeasement, she was downright furious at Henry’s lack of comment. Adam could not remember the last time Henry had opted for silence before Blue’s heated expression focused on him with laser-precision.

“Oh, and I bet you just love him, too,” Blue said scathingly, her eyes accusing and amped up.

Adam took a leaf from Henry’s book for possibly the first time in his life and remained silent. With no further outlet and with Henry crossing the store to flip the “closed” sign to “open,” Blue dropped the subject, though her shoulders remained tense as she rang up the first Pumpkin Spice Latte order of the day.

* * *

As the morning passed, Adam allowed thoughts of Ronan, Gansey, and Chainsaw to nearly disappear. The only reminder of their presence was Blue’s continuously sulky behavior and Noah’s occasional repetition of “then just say bye” in a quiet falsetto before breaking off into a laugh and a shake of his pale head.

Henry, in a burst of glee, had put on Madonna’s _True Blue_ to play in the background, and Noah had been as easily infected by the enthusiasm as ever. But Adam very nearly screwed up several orders in the morning rush, only his latent perfectionism kicking in before he could actually hand the drinks over to the wrong owners. The mistakes were minimal at best, barely taking any additional time to fix or even redo the orders, and no customers complained. The air was downright optimistic with the promise of a pumpkin spice latte season at hand, which translated well to the overall mood of the customers. But Blue noticed, she always did, and when a relative lull took over the café just before ten o’clock, she cornered him by the espresso machine.

“Bee in your bonnet?” she asked, one of the many bee-phrases she had stolen from Henry over the years before it had become a common enough saying in her own vernacular.

“Bird in my apartment.”

“I’m not familiar with that metaphor.”

“There was a bird in my apartment this morning. Woke me up before my alarm.” She looked at him like she expected more, and he sighed under her knowing eye. “I was up until after midnight working on my history paper.”

He thought for a moment of mentioning his lost apron, but he could already see that argument play out. He already hated the concern in her eyes right now from the mention of the late night writing session, he couldn’t handle it expanded with the knowledge of misplaced items due to exhaustion.

Blue must have picked up on some semblance of Adam’s disdain for this conversation and its potential routes to further arguments, and she let the matter drop.

“What’s the paper on?” she asked instead.

“Public history requirement.” Glad for the subject change, he moved to bus the tables recently cleared of their customers. He continued on in a dull recitation. “I have to research how local and regional history associations present history to the public and how the public interacts with these discourses on history.”

He piled the plates deftly and held them aloft, righting the fallen salt shaker with his free hand before removing the small pillar of salt left behind into his wipe.

“Not to bring up a poor subject,” Henry cut into their conversation, loud to be heard from the kitchen, “but Gansey would be the perfect person to talk to about that.”

Blue sucked her teeth derisively but added nothing of further value to the statement.

“Oh yeah.”

Adam looked up in time to see Noah’s head pop out from the kitchen where he worked with Henry to artfully ice the maple leaf shaped cookies Henry had been selling since October began a week prior. Brown icing looked slick and shiny on his cheek like a fresh bruise, but it did little to deter the gummy smile on his face. “He’d be thrilled to talk to someone about local history, especially someone who would let him actually finish talking before they left the room.”

“You should contact him,” Henry prompted eagerly.

It was clear from the anticipatory silence following Henry’s statement that Adam was expected to respond.

“Um, alright,” he agreed with a non-committal jerk of his head. He was already mentally shifting his schedule around and calculating how to fit in what was sure to be a lengthy conversation with Gansey’s boundless politeness and admiration that seemed only to take from Adam what he could not afford to give. It did not seem like a fair trade for his limited time, but Henry’s bright eyes allowed for nothing less than a yes.

“Oh goody,” Blue sniped, “that’ll be fun.”

“No more negativity, Miss Blue!” Henry stepped out of the kitchen area with more composure and authority than Adam could have anticipated from someone in a floral apron streaked with icing and flour. “Not in this beautiful shop surrounded by my midnight retail therapy decorations after dedicated research on Martha Stewart’s website! Hours of work went into this, Blue. At least two!”

“ _Pshaw_.”

“We are the Boo Crew!”

“I literally hate you so much right now,” she informed him, her spiky hair posturiously scornful at Henry’s glee.

Adam let his friends’ laughter wash over him as he moved to the next table. A few more hours of this, he thought as he tugged at the hem of Blue’s apron against his legs, her frogs looking up at him friendly and blank. A few more hours, that would be all right.


	2. Chapter Two

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I want to take a moment to thank my friend/editor/person who listens to me ramble on constantly, aleksandr_starshow. I honestly can't say enough how much I appreciate all your help and my chapters/characterizations are so much stronger as a result. Thank you so much!
> 
> Please enjoy Chapter Two!

**Chapter 2 (Friday afternoon/evening, October 6)**

Adam had not been out of the café for longer than it took to cross the street before his phone buzzed in his pocket. He stopped in front of the artisanal soap shop across the street from the Busy Bee Café to see a text from Henry: a string of numbers alongside the name _Gansey_. The sharp scent of pumpkin and cinnamon hit him like a wall as someone on the street bustled by his deaf ear to open the soap shop door. Clearly, Henry was not the only one capitalizing on the season. In Adam’s hand, another text came through almost immediately.

 **12:07 Henry  
** _Gansey is a kitten and will love to help you with your paper_

Congruously, Adam’s mind supplied frustration at Henry’s meddling and the tagalong reminder to himself that Henry meant well, _remember_ that he meant well. However, his tenuous grasp of goodwill towards Henry was quickly released as a third message lit up his screen.

 **12:08 Henry  
** _Also go inside the soap shop and fuck up Mrs. Owen's window display. It’s cute and I hate it_

Adam did not enter the soap shop.

 **12:08 Henry  
** _Adam you are a terrible employee and a worse friend_

* * *

After several hours of feeling off-kilter and on display in Blue’s borrowed apron, he felt even worse now to be without it. When his shift ended, he offered to take it home and wash it before returning it to her despite its relative cleanliness from the morning shift. “Don’t worry about it,” she had said, though she must have known he would. “Besides, you do your laundry at my house anyway.”

She hadn’t meant to hurt him, but she had. It was the casual reminders as much as intentional jabs that rocked Adam’s sense of self.

He stood now in his coveralls with tattoos of grease in the creases of his elbows, under his fingernails, in the indent marks left on his wrists. This was his second uniform of the day, worn and wearing on him during his shifts at Boyd’s Mechanics.

He had worked at Boyd’s first before starting at the café and had never quite heard the end of it when he had let slip why he couldn’t come in early on the mornings when the shop had a random surge of business.

“Well ain’t that just so sweet,” Boyd would guffaw. The other guys in the shop would join in and joke in a way that Adam did not enjoy but would smile hollowly at all the same, understanding what he needed to give up in order to maintain some semblance of acceptance at the shop. But then Adam would bring a batch of scones Henry deemed too dry, too burnt, too un-Henry to be sold in the café but still good enough to eat, and the mechanics would hold their comments behind their teeth.

He’d been working there since high school, an outlet for his attraction to cars that actually allowed for some profit. He’d been working on cars even longer and could remember the rare Saturday afternoon with his father showing him parts of an engine, a brake line, a spark plug. These were almost happy memories, learning the secret machinations under smooth, painted hoods and having his father’s attentions on him in ways that didn’t make his heart curl in fear. Some afternoons would pass pleasantly enough, Adam grasping the basic concepts quickly and eagerly, learning the names of parts and the intricate way they all pieced together. But then some would be spoiled when Adam would spill some essential fluid, would forget which way a part fit in and his father would bark “Gotta teach you something for you to be useful around here” or “Christ Adam, I told you this shit last week, I ain’t your teachers coddling you at school. Learn to fucking listen when I talk” or “Look at you with all that grease on your shirt for your mother to clean. No respect for her at all.”

The words changed, the sentiment remained the same.

Even as his mind skirted over the memories, the wrench remained a solid anchor in his hand. He felt the final lug nestle in place under the twist of his nail-ravaged wrist and finally pulled away from the nose of the Range Rover. All along his spine, he felt his sore muscles in sudden, heightened sensation as though his brain had blocked out their growing irritation while he had been bent over the engine. A cursory glance at the clock surprised him to find several hours had passed during his concentration.

Tucking the wrench into his pocket of his coveralls, Adam swept the back of his other hand over his forehead in an attempt to wipe away the headache brewing beneath his brow. At his workstation, he allowed himself a spare minute to drink thirstily at his water bottle and glance at his cell phone laying haphazardly among the mess of tools. He had heard it go off several times while he had been working, his hands and mind too preoccupied to deal with what he assumed were countless texts from Henry.

Already anticipating his headache worsening with the texts, he checked them anyway. The notifications would bug him until he cleared them away from his screen.

 **12:08 Henry  
** _Jk ily_

 **1:14 Henry  
** _But in all seriousness text Gansey. It breaks my heart to see you so tired._

 **2:37 Henry  
** _Gansey helped me with a paper once in high school and my teachers wept with gratitude. Don’t you want to make your teachers cry, Adam?_

 **3:22 Henry  
** _text Gansey text Gansey text Gansey text Gansey_

 **3:51 Unknown  
** _Hello Adam, this is Gansey. I hope it’s alright that Henry gave me your number. He explained the situation to me and I would be thrilled to help. Also, this is fortuitous for me because maybe we could help each other out. One of my machines at work does not seem to like me and Henry has explained to me that you are a friend to all machines. Perhaps you could look it over while we go over the finer points of your paper?_

 **3:55 Unknown  
** _No pressure, just let me know._

Irritation made him greedy with his time. He had meant to get back to work immediately after finishing his water, but instead he stood there for another long pause to stare at his phone. The nature of Gansey’s messages wasn’t what annoyed him, he could be grateful for Gansey’s offer and even appreciated the give-and-take nature of helping Gansey in return. But ultimately, he hadn’t been the one to text Gansey. He hadn’t decided yet if he had even wanted to. He knew there was no way Gansey could have known he was busy at Boyd’s, but Henry had known. He did not and could not have his phone as an extension of his hand like Henry could, like Noah was prone to do, like he assumed Gansey did. He had work, he had class, he had papers to write, he had four hours a night to dedicate to sleep if he was lucky.

He did not respond to the texts.

All though that might have been less due to his irritation and more due to the fact that he had nearly thrown it from his hands as a figure suddenly appeared in his peripheral vision.

“Scare ya there, Parrish?”

Tad Carruthers stood there with his voice dripping with boyish confidence. A former classmate of Henry’s for several years and a former classmate of Adam’s for several months, Tad had grown from the privileged son of one of the wealthiest men in town to be the privileged son of Henrietta’s elected mayor. He wore the title as well as a cartoon character version of himself would, all blond hair, shiny smile, and lack of true responsibility for either. The hands looped in his pockets were as aggressively smug as the smirk on his face.

“Sorry, didn’t hear you come in,” Adam apologized, taking a slow breath and willing his heart to return to a normal pace.

“That’s what you get from staring at your phone.”

Adam slipped his phone back out of sight on his work station. He looked back up at Tad, who shook his head a little under the too-bright white lights overhead, causing his hair to gleam triumphantly.

Blue and Henry had heated debates over the origins of his hair every time Tad came into the café. Adam tried to ignore this, too busy dealing with Tad’s ridiculous orders and the enormous tips he’d leave at the counter that were more insulting than generous when paired with his showcase smiles. Blue stood firmly in the camp of not-dyed while Henry, resentful of any hair whose volume could compete with his, was ready to die on the hill of “bottle blond.” Noah had once offered a conspiracy that it was a wig, but he had been drowned out too quickly for the theory to catch on.

“I came to check on my Rover,” Tad provided at Adam’s lack of inquiry, gesturing with lazy possessiveness to the car before Adam.

 _Oh, so that’s who this car belonged to_ . Adam had been working on it for the better part of the week. He had planned on finishing it today, but his pace was subdued if not downright sluggish. _Sleep debt_ , his brain supplied unhelpfully. This was the true measure of the debt, the build up of what lack of sleep had cost him. And now he was paying with this extended time with Tad. There was nothing inherently wrong with Tad, except that everything he said carried the same weight as a personal attack but with none of the intended venom behind it. He was brutal in his flippancy, every comment somehow pointed even without intent.

“It should be done this weekend.”

“Dragging it out because you like her so much?” The wink was as much in Tad’s voice as it was in the sudden blink of his eye. Adam ignored the smile still pasted on his face.

“Just giving attention to detail like you deserve.” Boyd had taught him that phrase after informing him of one too many complaints he had received from customers about Adam’s long held stares and extended silences by way of customer service.

“You should consider yourself lucky. I don’t like a lot of people handling her.” Tad saddled up to the side of his car, his posture suggesting Adam take note of how he fit with a car like that, how this shiny monster belonged to someone like him. His smile grew a little wider and Adam hated his teeth. “But I guess you’ve got a special touch.”

Adam felt his blood come to a roiling boil at these words. It wasn’t enough to have to work on these cars he could not afford, even if he did decide a Range Rover was something he could want. But it was a further insult to have to stand there and listen to the arrogance of the customers who brought their cars in for simple tune-ups because they never had to learn to fix them when they were younger or never had to worry about saving money on repairs by doing it themselves. He wanted to work, to do a good job, to leave quietly.

But Tad did not allow that, even as Adam began to pack up his workstation. If it was rude of him to pack at the end of a shift while a customer stood there staring, then he’d just have to deal with Boyd’s lecture later. Part of him burned with the idea of not performing his best at work, but everyone had to know by now that Adam was meant to work with machines, not with people.

“Is that a wrench in your pocket or are you just happy to see me?” Tad continued to be the worst and Adam had no interest in hearing whatever punchline Tad had to offer.

“It’s a wrench,” Adam remarked coolly, pulling the wrench from his coveralls to return to his workstation.

“Right.” Tad coughed. There was a moment when his chic Son-of-the-Mayor’s look dropped and he shifted from one foot to the other. Even his golden hair seemed to dim in the lights as he worried at his lips silently before making an abortive gesture at Adam that might have been a wave good-bye, might have been a flip off.

It was, Adam thought, the sort of gesture Ronan could have pulled off, but on Tad it simply looked ineffective and juvenile. Adam felt a vindictive sort of happiness until Tad finally, awkwardly left.

* * *

The weight of Gansey’s texts held down his pockets like rocks in a river.

Every time Adam reached into his messenger bag for his notebook, his folder, a new highlighter, his fingers brushed the rounded edges of his phone and he was reminded of his obligations to respond to Gansey.

“A strategy to foster urban public history should certainly exploit place memory as well as social memory. For example, place memory might include personal memory of one’s arrival in the city and emotional attachments there, cognitive memory of its street names and street layout, and body memory of routine journeys to home and work.” The TA read laconically from the pre-written lesson plan at the front of the lecture hall.

It wasn’t that he didn’t like Gansey, he mused. He liked Gansey very much, in fact. He liked the way Gansey’s presence filled a room effortlessly, he liked the way he included everyone in his conversations, he liked the bright look in Gansey’s eyes whenever someone asked him about Henrietta, he liked the slight tousle of his hair that suggested he had arrived from his last location in a rush.

“Because the urban landscape stimulates visual memory, it is an important but underutilized resource for public history. While many curators concerned with artifacts have long understood the strength of visual memory, social historians often have not had much visual training and are not always well equipped to evaluate environmental memory’s component of visual evidence.”

Adam snapped back to attention, digging his nail into his wrist . And even as the sharp sensation dulled to a nearly invisible ache, he dragged his hand across his notebook, spidery handwriting dropping vowels in his unusual shorthand to take faster notes. He did not allow himself to think of his phone for the rest of the class.

The lecture did not drone on, necessarily. Adam enjoyed history and his teacher was an acceptable sort. Eligius University classes were just not what Adam had strived toward while toiling away in his high school classes. But even as valedictorian from Henrietta High, Adam had no money to his name and no strings to pull and nothing else to get him a coveted Ivy League acceptance letter. Out-of-state schools also proved to be outside his range of possibilities, so he was here: twenty-five years old, working three part-time jobs, and attending school part-time, and with nothing to show for it except a tiny one-room apartment over St. Agnes church and a nearly completed degree in engineering. 

“Body memory is also difficult to convey as part of books or exhibits. It connects into places because of the shared experience of dwellings, public spaces, and workplaces, and the paths traveled between home and work, give body memory its social component, modified by the postures of gender, race, and class. The experience of physical labor is also part of the body memory.”

It really was a good school, he reminded himself. It did not deserve his disdain just because it was not an ivy league. They were probably overrated, anyway, just hedge funds masquerading as universities. His stomach felt empty at the thought.

“Body memory moves us directly into place, whose very immobility contributes to its distinct potency in matters of memory. What is remembered is well grounded if it is remembered as being in a particular place, a place that may well take precedence over the time of its occurrence.”

His professor was well respected and the TA was decent, if Adam overlooked his flat tone while reading the professor’s notes.

“For urban landscape history, community-based public history is a natural ally. The great strength of this approach to public history is its desire for a shared authority or a dialogic history that gives power to communities to define their own collective pasts. This approach is based on the understanding that the history of workers, women, ethnic groups, and the poor requires broad source materials, including oral histories, because often people are the best authorities on their own pasts.”

He still did not know what to write for his paper.

“Remember.” The TA sounded livelier and animated now that he was finished reading the notes. “Papers are due a week from today.”

Adam blinked, not catching the cue that class had ended like the rest of his classmates. He was slower than them to shut his notebook and collect his materials into his messenger bag. He handled it carefully, one side of the strap looked about as strained as Adam felt.

His fingers brushed against his phone.

The room was very nearly empty of students and the TA was gathering up his own papers, carefully avoiding Adam’s gaze as though Adam’s lingering form was an indication that he wanted to stay behind to talk. It was Friday night and he clearly had no intention of staying here longer than necessary. There was no way he could have known that the real reason Adam stood there was a mixture of exhaustion and a delaying of the inevitable.

 **7:55 Adam  
** _Hey Gansey, thank you for the offer. I could really appreciate the help and I’d be happy to help you with your machine in return._

As soon as Adam had left the lecture hall, much to his TA’s relief he was sure, his phone vibrated in his hand several times in quick succession. Adam added _fast texter_ to his growing list of Gansey’s attributes.

 **7:58 Unknown  
** _Fantastic! I’m working at Monmouth Manufacturing if you want to swing by tonight. Henry mentioned you had class. I don’t know how late that runs, but I am going to be here all night, so anytime you want to come is cool with me._

 **7:58 Unknown  
** _Or you can come another time if that works better for you. I don’t know what the projected timeline is for your paper._

 **7:59 Unknown  
** _I’m at MM most evenings, so really whatever works best for you works best for me. I know how busy you are._

Adam knew he had already made a ruin of his wrists, but he pressed his nail against the thin skin one more time.

 **8:00 Adam  
** _See you tonight._

* * *

Under his skin, Ronan felt electric.

To look at him, one could not see it. He sat in a mid-century modern chair that was both supremely uncomfortable and ungodly ugly, boots still and firm on the cool cement floor of Monmouth Manufacturing and arms crossed over his chest. He was a statue in repose.

But he had been charged all day, something simmering beneath the surface and playing in the background since his delivery at Henry’s stupid café. It had carried him through his afternoon chores at the Barns and pushed him now to be with Gansey in the shell of his hopeful museum.

Though Gansey had drawn the line at allowing Chainsaw into the factory under what Ronan considered to be a baseless assumption that she would destroy all of his work (she was not motivated enough to cause absolute destruction), he had allowed Ronan to pick the music. Ronan considered this a particularly telling indicator that Gansey had noticed his voltaic mood as they historically disagreed with each other’s musical tastes. Listening to the hum and thrum of Swedish House Mafia’s electronica churn out of the shitty bluetooth speaker he had finally negotiated Gansey into buying in exchange for his help, he watched Gansey sort through what Ronan assumed was his thousandth pile of boring historical papers. When it was Gansey, they were always historical papers and they were always boring.

Ronan did not hate history, but he did not have the same near-obsession that Gansey had to document days long past. No one did, he figured. He remembered high school and the admiration the teachers had expressed whenever Gansey stayed behind for just one quick question, just a moment of their time. And when their wells had run dry, he had turned to libraries for lists of accolades and a repository of newspapers and then to old local families for a cup of tea and a good story. Exploring the sensational alongside the mundane, Gansey devoured it all.

He had never expected Ronan to share in the depths of his passion, but had included him in as much as Ronan was willing to be included. He had gone along to the library and attended at least a few informal interviews with families before his snake smile sliding across his face and his hooked tattoo creeping out from his tank top had cost Gansey some of his good will with the locals. So when Gansey told him over the summer that he was returning to Henrietta determined to be its local historian and also “Ronan, have you ever looked at Monmouth Manufacturing because I just purchased it to be the new town museum!” Ronan had been ready to take up the mantle again.

Monmouth Manufacturing was an enormous factory, left shuttered and abandoned some several decades ago. It was three stories high, lofted ceiling exposing a maze of ductwork above them. Metal staircases in the corners of the giant and perfectly square room led to metal floors above jutting into the space. They had been immediately inspected and maintained over the summer and Gansey had attempted to muffle the sound of footsteps against the metal grid with tasteful and perfunctory carpets. Between machinery equipment on the main floor, crates of donated materials and Gansey’s carefully purchased museum displays sat waiting to be unwrapped and made pretty.

As far as Ronan could tell, Monmouth Manufacturing’s original purpose was to make dust and lots of it. Dust could still be seen floating in the air and caught in the sunbeams through the floor to ceiling windows on the west side of the monstrous building. Gansey had at one point, probably over the summer when they had first rolled in box after box of artifacts into the wide space, explained glassy-eyed and exuberant, its full history. During long afternoons sorting and categorizing collected artifacts, he had probably listed the names of former employees alphabetically in between shipments of museum-grade casework and furniture and then explained its contributions to Henrietta in its decades-long presence in the town. 

“You could at least pretend to help.”

Even with the clutter of junk ( _historical artifacts, Ronan_ ) filling the space, Gansey echoed somewhat in the vast ceiling of the factory.

“Isn’t that what you invited Parrish for?” Ronan broke his statue pose only to bite his words at Gansey.

“Don’t be jealous, Lynch.”

Lifting his gaze from the yellowed ledger papers in front of him, Gansey peered at Ronan with as much admonishment as could be expected from a grown man sitting cross-legged on the floor. Ronan held the look between them until Gansey turned away. It was not a gesture made from defeat; Gansey had known him too long to be affected by his stares any longer.

As if on cue, there was a quiet clamoring near the front doors where Gansey and Ronan had been stationed for the better part of the evening. Adam entered and brought with him the heady scent of gasoline. His wrist automatically rose to his mouth, and, biting at his leather bands, Ronan let the scent wash over him.

“Ah, Adam!” Gansey gave off the air of one who was pleasantly surprised by a visitor, as though he hadn’t been glancing eagerly at the door every few minutes since his announcement that Adam would be stopping by. He immediately rose from his spot on the floor and crossed in quick strides to greet Adam. He held his fist out expectantly to Adam who seemed to eye it with mostly-concealed consternation before a brief tap of his own knuckles. “Glad you found the place! I realized after I texted you that you maybe didn’t know about Monmouth Manufacturing.”

“GPS,” Adam explained succinctly, his hand withdrawing from Gansey to clutch at his messenger bag again. Ronan did not miss how Adam’s hand automatically went to the most noticeable sign of wear on the strap. “But you’re right, I never really noticed this place.” He looked around, his keen eyes catching into the dark and dusty corners of the room.

“Not many people do.”

“Not surprising. It was a shithole until last month,” Ronan snorted. For the first time since he entered, Adam looked at him under dusty eyebrows.

“Yes, I had the entire front area cleared out. No more weeds coming through the cracked pavement.”

“Now it’s just shithole-adjacent.”

“Right.” Adam’s Henrietta accent was tinged with his usual irritation towards Ronan and he sounded eager to move on to the real reason he was there. “You have a machine that needs fixed?”

If Gansey was surprised Adam had opted to focus on his end of the bargain first, Ronan was decidedly not.

“Yeah, it’s over in this section.” 

Adam immediately followed him, his messenger bag still clutched like a security blanket. Neither of them looked at Ronan to follow suit, but he lifted himself from the chair anyway. He paced himself a few feet away from them, hands deep in his pockets, and listened as Gansey gave rapid and loving names to the different milling machines they passed. Adam gave each one a curious look, cataloguing the names to memory.

“Do you think we’ll be able to have this museum up and running by the Harvest Festival?” Gansey asked, more thoughtful than fretful. “That’s my goal, but I don’t know if it’s attainable.”

Adam shrugged his narrow shoulders, eyes still unblinkingly seeing the landscape of the room. He provided no comfort or dismissal of Gansey’s concern.

All three of them paused by an old penny arcade automaton, Gansey and Adam positioned in front of the machine and Ronan a shadowy figure behind them. It was a coin-operated fortune-telling machine, vintage advertisement boosting promises to tell one’s fortune in faded colors. Encased in metal and glass on a tiny tufted seat sat a truly ugly Puss in Boots, its Cheshire grin somehow still bright against the faded black fur. Its yellow eyes stared out at them as unblinkingly as Adam’s, though it lacked any of his curiosity or derision.

“Here’s the patient.”

Adam gave a single nod, gently dropped his messenger bag to the floor, and reached out with one boyish hand, long fingers wrapped around the crank handle to its side. Looking to Gansey as though expecting permission, he waited until Gansey made an affirmative noise before giving it a twist. Ronan could see the highlight of a ghost lamp near them reflected off the bone jutting from Adam’s wrist as his hand met resistance with the crank at its highest arc.

Ronan and Gansey watched noiselessly as Adam moved around the machine, fingers deftly finding latches and screws. He then dug around in his bag for tools before Gansey nudged the tool box he had brought over earlier that day closer to Adam’s line of vision. Adam looked mildly surprised at Gansey’s foresight but said nothing as he pulled out a screwdriver.

Silence continued until Gansey could no longer take it.

“Fortune telling machines such as these were invented by J. Parkes in England back in the 1860s,” Gansey began, his voice a smooth transition into his cool professor lilt. “Live fortune tellers were always popular, of course, who wouldn’t want to know if riches and love was just around the corner? But Parkes obtained a patent for a machine he developed that would predict one’s future for a single cent. For just a penny, visitors could get their fortunes printed on a ticket. There are many different variations of this machine, this one is the Puss in Boots model. The owner who donated it to the museum, thankfully, had a certificate of authenticity and this one was made in New York in 1903.”

He shifted back to his normal tone to say, “I think it’s quite charming.”

Ronan did not agree and he could tell by the slight rise of Adam’s eyebrows that his opinion landed closer to Ronan’s than Gansey’s.

“I suppose you’re particularly apt for this,” Gansey carried on, either ignorant of Adam’s eyebrows or indifferent to them. “Henry tells me you’re a psychic? That you work with Blue and her family?”

This caught Ronan’s attention.

“I do online tarot readings,” Adam corrected in a half-answer. He had managed to get the rusted side panel undone and now half of his face was obscured by it as he peered inside.

“With Blue and her family?” Gansey’s face made only the slightest twitch as he said Blue’s name. “Henry says they are a family of psychics?”

“Something like that.”

Jesus, Ronan thought, it was like pulling teeth. Apparently, Gansey was starting to feel similarly frustrated with Adam’s less than thorough responsiveness and probed further.

“Can you explain?”

“You’d have to ask Blue for the details, really.” Adam sighed wearily, aiming a flashlight into the paneling. From the opposite side, Ronan could see light glowing through the small gaps where the welded seams had come undone. “Her cousin set up a website a few years back for people to send in online tarot questions. About two years ago, Blue said they were doing more business than they could keep up with and asked me if I wanted to help. I figured it wouldn’t be all that difficult to memorize a few cards for some spare cash.”

Judging from the tightness edging its way across Adam’s mouth, Ronan could tell it was not “spare cash,” no matter how much Adam wanted to throw the words away.

“That’s fascinating,” Gansey said genuinely.

“It really isn’t.”

Ronan could see another question queuing up on Gansey’s face and decided to spare Adam any further indignities.

“Gonna tell me my future?” he asked, letting his words crawl a little rudely into the space between them.

“That’s not how the cards work. Not really,” Adam responded shortly. He maneuvered two tools between his long fingers, the wrench twirled around his punctuated knuckles in an afterthought before looking hard at Ronan with all of the defiance he always spared Gansey from. “And it’s definitely not how I work.”

The air crackled under Adam’s disdainful expression.

“How then?” Gansey did not make Ronan start like Adam had, but only because he had caught himself at the last second.

“Excuse me?”

“How do they work?”

“Oh.” Adam blinked a few too many times before shifting into undeniable frustration. “I don’t _know_ , Gansey. I don’t believe in the magic of them. They’re just cards.”

There was a long pause that affected all three of them differently. Gansey gracefully slipping into silence, Adam shamed into it, Ronan captivated. Tinny traces of Ronan’s music suddenly felt much larger in the unoccupied space. Adam further filled the silence with the clink of tools against the unseen gears and the scratching of rust leaving metal for several long minutes before he huffed out a small breath. Ronan watched Adam touch at the same loose thread on his collar that had so clearly bothered him at the café this morning, his fingers ghosting along the exposed edge of his prominent collarbone before he shifted away from the machine.

Adam waited until his back was towards both of them to speak again.

“I don’t know, it’s like a tool.” He spoke into the toolbox as he rummaged around. He found what he was looking for, a pocket-sized bottle of oil, and returned to his stance by the machine. “You hold up a card, like The Devil. You tell people it means being held back by potential. Nine times out of ten, they immediately get a thought in their head about what’s holding them back. That answer was already in their mind, you just helped pull it to the surface. You aren’t telling them anything they don’t already know, you’re just using universal archetypes to help people sort out their thoughts.”

Gansey nodded slowly, mouth pursed thoughtfully as he mulled over Adam’s explanation.

“Like I said, fascinating.”

Adam didn’t look at Gansey, he certainly did not look at Ronan, but he flushed under his fine-boned face and he tucked himself a little tighter to the machine. He did not dispute Gansey’s words again though, which was probably as much of a win as could be expected.

The much more companionable silence stretched a little longer between them all before Gansey settled into something more business-like.

“So, you have a paper to write? Public history?”

Yeah.” Adam looked relieved to have shifted back to more comfortable topics. “I’m supposed to write how the public interacts with local history, essentially.”

“Oh! This museum! That’s my dream for this museum!”

As though lit up from the inside, Gansey then launched into his usual spiel, his entire person coming alive before Ronan and Adam. Adam raised an eyebrow at Ronan, and Ronan shrugged as if to say he was not as affected by Gansey’s sudden brilliance anymore.

“I grew up in DC, but came here for school,” Gansey explained with the same rote story Ronan had heard so many times over at this point, but it had not lost any of its appeal over the years. “I fell in love with this town, it just felt right, you know?”

Even with his focus on oiling the gears, Adam’s face was a study in passivity.

“Are you familiar with Aglionby Academy? Henry and I attended years ago. Ronan, too, for a bit.”

Familiar enough with Gansey’s aggrandizements, Ronan allowed himself the cruel gift of reminiscence.

Aglionby had been hell for Ronan. Its halls were suffocation incarnate, the unproductive teenage noises the soundtrack of his nerves on edge, the uniform tie a noose around his neck. It had been a school for the elite and sons of the elite and Ronan, a species separate from all of that, had hated all of it. He could not remember beyond a slideshow of images that didn’t matter and conversations that didn’t stick, but he could remember the feeling of staring at the walls done up in navy, thinking he was drowning.

His hatred had been a weighty thing and it had choked him.

Gansey had been the bright spot. Gansey with his stupid shoes and stupid polo shirts and stupid eyes that remained focused and vivid even at the worst of moments. Gansey had been the one person in Ronan’s life aside from his younger brother and mother who asked nothing from Ronan except for him to be Ronan, and Ronan had loved him for it far more than he had loved himself at the time. They had been a two-headed creature at Aglionby whenever Ronan had managed to actually attend class. Gansey had been the light, Ronan had been what lived in the shadow.

Ronan could remember Adam at Aglionby, too.

When Henry first introduced Ronan to Adam months ago at the café, Ronan had nearly opened his mouth to correct Henry, to say he had already known Adam before catching himself with the words collapsing haphazardly in his throat. Instead he stood there, staring Adam down, waiting for Adam to correct Henry, to say something. Adam had only given him a perfunctory nod, smart enough to know better than to offer a handshake, and said nothing further. He gave no indication to Henry that he had attended Aglionby, had excelled in Latin, had worn his secondhand sweater with the hemmed sleeve day in and day out. Ronan could remember him in technicolor vision though, as an alien silhouette in the navy classrooms with his hand perfectly raised at the end of every asked question. Ronan remembered like a snapshot image his right hand extended in their air, his first two fingers pointed to the ceiling, his ring finger and pinky curled to his calloused palm like casualties.

If Adam never spoke about his time at Aglionby then Ronan, never one to bring up the school of his own volition, never mentioned this to Adam.

Metal crashed together and the sound momentarily jolted Ronan back to Aglionby. The sound of lockers slamming had been a solitary comfort in those hated halls, but here it was just Adam. Finished whatever magic he had been performing with Gansey’s pampered machine, he had closed the panel with little grace. As though aware of Ronan’s thoughts, Adam’s eyes lifted to his. Ronan did not turn away.

“Fixed already, Parrish?” Gansey said, not bothering to hide how impressed he was.

“Needs a coin, but yeah.”

Immediately, Gansey slipped his leather wallet from his back pocket to produce a penny. Adam moved from the machine to give Gansey space, but Gansey simply pressed the coin into Adam’s hand. Ronan saw a flash of copper pass between them before Adam’s hands closed around it automatically. With an odd set to his mouth, Adam slipped the coin into the slot and wrapped his hand again around the crank of the machine to turn it without any further preamble. The newly oiled and aligned gears rolled silently against each other, and Puss in Boots moved jankly in his glass box.

A ticket appeared from the slot in the front into Adam’s waiting hand. His eyes scanned it, fingers flipping it over for any signs of damage. The odd set to his mouth morphed into an odd smile, something closer to a smirk that might have looked at home in Ronan’s mirror. Adam turned and Ronan, expecting him to extend the card to Gansey, watched with pasted ambivalence.

“Here’s your fortune, Lynch.” Adam flicked the card at him before gathering up the discarded tools.

Ronan managed to snag it out of the air before it fluttered to the concrete floor. Instead of reading it, he palmed the ticket and crossed his arms, leaning back heavily against the wall. Stretching out his legs, his head rested insolently against unforgiving brick to look down at Adam. Gansey’s eyes were heavy on him, but Ronan ignored him.

“Well if that’s all, Gansey, I gotta get going.”

“Ronan,” Gansey announced with such abrupt authority that both Adam and Ronan jerked their heads to look at him. “Give Adam your number, too.”

“Why?” Ronan snapped. His _why_ sounded to his own ears like _why are you doing this to me?_

“Yeah, why?” Adam echoed. His _why_ also sounded like _why are you doing this to me?_ but with a significantly different inflection.

“Ronan can help you study.”

“I can?” Ronan deadpanned at the same time Adam asked incredulously, “He can?”

Gansey just shrugged. “Yeah, sure.”

Both of them waited for Gansey to elaborate, but Gansey merely stood there, patiently passing his eyes from one to the other, hands looped into his pockets. His form was so purposely casual that Ronan’s eyebrows drew together suspiciously.

Adam pulled the phone from his bag slowly, still looking at Gansey. He didn’t make any further moves to hand his phone to Ronan, though.

Instantly fatigued by this entire exchange, Ronan kicked off from the wall.

“Oh Jesus Christ,” he growled, snagging the phone from Adam. He saw Adam’s eyes catch on the fortune still in his hand and Ronan scowled as he shoved the ticket into his pocket. With a few stabs at the screen, he plugged his number into Adam’s phone. Instead of a name, he left an obnoxious signature of emojis.

He’d had every intention of passing the phone back to Adam in the same manner he had taken it, but something about seeing Adam’s hand already outstretched towards him, calloused palm to the ceiling and fingers barely curled, stopped him. Instead, he shoved Adam’s hand out of the way and stepped into his space to slip the phone directly into the messenger bag. He heard it land at the bottom with a satisfying and muffled sound.

Adam deigned to give him a solitary withering look before nodding to Gansey and walking away. He left as quietly as he came, leaving a burst of October chill in his wake as the door shut behind him.

“What a guy.” Gansey kept his eyes on the closed door across the room for another moment longer before turning to examine the fortune teller machine with renewed interest.

Ronan had nothing to add, but dug the ticket out of his pocket to finally read it. It was none the worse for wear for how Ronan had mistreated it, aside from the crumpled upper left corner.

In large purple font, it read:

 **Answer to your question:  
** **YOU WILL KNOW IN A FEW DAYS.**

* * *

Adam hadn’t been gone for long before Ronan packed it in himself. He scuffed at the back of Gansey’s head like he would his younger brother, an action Gansey was sure to recognize and be annoyed about. Gansey had not disappointed him and flashed him the finger good night.

Ronan stepped outside of Monmouth Manufacturing and whistled the tune he reserved for Chainsaw. He hoped she had stayed close enough while hunting. She was smart enough to know how to return to the Barns, but Ronan wanted her to return home with him all the same. He inclined his ear towards the sky, but did not hear her usual call of “Kerah!”

The cool night air on the pull of his neck as he listened for her was an instant relief after the musty warmth of Gansey’s museum. But even as he walked to his car along the recently repaired concrete, his relief was snatched from him.

A white mitsubishi idled nearby like a threat. It seemed to loom next to Ronan’s BMW like prey in the leaves, its headlights seeking him out even as he walked closer to its boyish beauty. The voracious black mouth of a grill sneered at him hungrily, but its expression paled in comparison to its driver.

Joseph Kavinsky reclined in his seat in an enviable slump of sinewy muscles. His signature sunglasses, the frames the same moon-white as his car, were pushed lazily into his fine dark hair and for once Ronan could see the hollow-eyed expression turned fully on him.

He would not let himself shudder.

Above, Ronan could hear Chainsaw finally responding to his call. Kavinsky did not break eye contact as he slipped his hand out the driver’s window, fingers pointed to the sky like a gun. He flexed suddenly and something shot out into the night. A rubber band, Ronan thought, but before he could little more than snarl at Kavinsky, a squawk sounded above. Chainsaw’s indignant note of disapproval made it clear that while she had not been harmed, the projectile had come worryingly close to her.

“Heya, Lynch,” Kavinsky greeted with a drawn out tone that was both jovial and vulgar and set Ronan’s skin on fire. “I’m bored as shit. Race me.”

This was not a request.

“Eat shit, K.”

This was not a request either.

Every moment spent staring at each other only served to infuriate Ronan. He wanted to race, he would not race. He wanted to fight, he would not fight. 

But then the moment paused, the kinetic energy in Ronan’s muscles stalled as his phone buzzed in his hand. He had forgotten it was there, had not realized his hand had balled tightly into a fist. He looked down and saw the flash of an unknown number. Adam?

He began to move again, forcing his legs to carry him past Kavinsky’s open window and towards his own car. As he grew closer to Kavinsky, he shifted in his seat to better look at Ronan.

“Come on,” Kavinsky offered grandly, coke-skinny arms spread out generously. “I’ll even wait for you to get your bitch ass into your bitch car.”

His voice wafted to Ronan, breath sweet with bubblegum. _Heroin_ , Ronan thought as the scent hit the back of his taste buds. He knew the different flavors of Kavinsky’s vices, knew the tells of each one. He would not race.

“Oh honey,” Kavinsky crooned, sickly sweet with venom. “Don’t tell me you’ve got a headache.” He let his foot press a little against the gas, his car letting out a pretty growl that made Ronan’s heart surge with muscle memory.

But Ronan said nothing, just outstretched an arm to Chainsaw, who landed precariously. She kept her eyes on Kavinsky, clearly keeping a lookout for any more rubber bands. Ronan pulled her protectively to his chest, a thin smile on his face as he stared at Kavinsky in clear dismissal.

Kavinsky took that expression for what it meant.

“Fine, bitch,” he spat out, all pretense of friendly banter instantly ripped from the air. “Be that way.”

There was no more room to talk as Kavinsky threw his car into motion, the squeal of the tires leaving a black mark on Gansey’s previously perfect concrete. The smell was acrid, but Ronan watched the taillights disappear into the night like a pair of red birds.

With the threat of rubber bands gone, Chainsaw quickly lost interest in just standing there and pecked at Ronan’s face. Uninterested in engaging her impatience further, Ronan opened the backseat to place her in her makeshift harness.

Once they were both settled into the car, Ronan finally grounded himself enough to check the unknown message burning on his phone.

 **10:27 Unknown  
** _Your taste in music sucks. Not surprised._

Leaning back in his seat, he allowed the slightest of smiles to reflect in the rearview mirror before typing back.

 **10:31 ronan  
** _Fck u parrish_

The electricity under his skin crackled.


	3. Chapter Three

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Again and always, thank you aleksandr_starshow for your edits and support.

**Chapter 3 (Saturday, October 7)**

Adam tried to decide what was more uncomfortable: the trickle of spilled coffee burning a path down his thumb as he held out the large black coffee order or the weighted stare of his former Latin teacher boring into him across the counter.

Barrington Whelk did not make a common appearance in the shop, but every time he did Adam tried to be in the kitchen, involved with another customer, or otherwise engaged to avoid him. A lifetime ago, Whelk had taught Adam at Aglionby. At the time, Adam had been a little in awe of him with his seamless wardrobe of neat suits and subtly patterned ties, with his borderline resentful style of teaching. But then, he had been a little in awe of everything at Aglionby.

Even now as he stood there, Adam could hear his own mind translating third conjugation verbs in its constant effort to prove itself. As Whelk slowly took the coffee cup from Adam’s grip, Adam did not snap his hand back to hastily wipe the spilled coffee on his apron, though he desperately wanted to.

He wondered if Whelk remembered him. Adam wanted Whelk to remember him, wanted some sick pleasure in being remembered as a student; a failure of a student who never amounted to anything beyond retail jobs in the same ten mile radius of where he had been born, but a student all the same. In the same breath of thought, Adam wanted Whelk to not know him at all.

Whelk left without any indication of whether or not he had been able to place Adam. He left no tip in the jar and left with his coffee and Adam was torn between the relief and the disappointment of being unknown.

Noah appeared at Adam’s shoulder.

“Something about that guy gives me the creeps.” Noah shuddered animatedly, his eyes seeking out Adam to make sure Adam laughed, grinned, cheered up in some minimal way.

Adam parceled out a smile to Noah because he could at least appreciate Noah’s efforts even if they amounted to very little. Seemingly satisfied with this, Noah slipped around him to ring up the next customer.

Looking up to see if any new customers had arrived and needed attention, Adam found himself distracted by movement just outside the entrance. There was Ronan, tall and dark in expensive jeans and black muscle tee, arms laden with wooden crates messily stamped with “The Barns.” 

Like the morning before, Ronan arrived with familiar company. This time, he was paired with a young man Adam could only describe as the sun side to Ronan’s moon. He shared Ronan’s roman nose and excellent teeth, but they looked so different when framed by a dimpled smile. Golden curls haloed his head and his easy laughter could be clearly heard as Ronan kicked at the door with his boots, arms too full to open it normally. Though Adam would hazard a guess that Ronan probably preferred to open all doors in such a directly contrary and violent manner.

Ronan dumped the boxes unceremoniously on the nearest table and offered no greeting beyond a nod to Noah. The other man, however, placed his slightly smaller stack of boxes with a little more care on another table before bounding immediately to where Adam stood at the counter.

“One large pumpkin spice latte, please! Extra whip!” The full force of his smile turned onto Adam was a little overwhelming and he found himself grateful when Ronan’s resounding snort pulled the younger man’s attention away from Adam.

“If I call my brother a basic white girl,” Ronan asked, craning his neck to look back through the doors into the kitchen, “is Sargent going to come out here to rip my head off?”

“She’s not working today, but I wouldn’t bet against it,” Adam called over his shoulder as he prepared Ronan’s brother’s drink.

“Perhaps it would summon her!” Henry all but popped out of the kitchen, a sudden appearance of spiked hair followed by the immediate spice of his aftershave. “Oh please do, I have been so bored today.”

Considering Henry had been practically knee-deep in sales orders in between batches of sugar cookies baking in the industrial ovens, Adam huffed a little to himself. It wasn’t that Henry was bored so much as it was that Henry only considered moments without Blue to be wasted.

“Pass,” Ronan said dismissively. Adam looked up to see him roll his eyes and lean a hip heavily against the edge of the counter. His contrapposto pose oozed apathy. "Anyway, here’s the goat cheese you ordered.” Ronan stabbed a thumb behind him at the boxes on the tables.

Henry wound his way between Adam and Noah behind the counter to eagerly pry open the nearest box.

“Wasn’t this supposed to have arrived yesterday?”

“It wasn’t ready yesterday.”

“Yeah,” Ronan’s brother chimed in, his voice a lighter and more charming knock off. “We hadn’t gotten everything packed the night before like we had planned. The lamb enclosure had fallen down and we spent pretty much the whole night chasing lambs.”

Adam gave himself the gift of imagining Ronan running on rolicking hills after wayward lambs and immediately exchanged deeply amused looks with Noah. This did not go unnoticed by Ronan who could only sneer at them both with empty threats. From his spot near the cheese, Henry rested his chin in his hands and pulled an exaggerated expression of adoration at Ronan

“Cute.”

“Oh yeah, they really are. Hey, thanks!” The brother said this last part to Adam, who handed him a coffee mug towered with whipped cream and sprinkled cinnamon powder. He picked up on absolutely none of his brother’s growing irritation as he continued cheerfully. “The lambs are really soft to hold, too. You should have seen Ronan. He kept swearing at them for running away, but he was holding them like babies when he brought them back. He was so worried about them.”

“Matthew,” Ronan cut him off, placing both hands on the sides of Matthew’s head and mashing down his curls. “Shut the fuck up.” 

Matthew made a rude gesture at his brother, but its effect was dampened by the whipped cream generously coating his upper lip. He pulled away from the grip, his hair now mussed and his face melting into a laugh. 

Henry looked imploringly at Matthew, somehow still poised even while talking around a mouthful of goat cheese. “Matthew, I will give you free drinks for life if you bring in photographic evidence of this.”

Matthew gave a thumbs up that barely registered before he flashed a peace sign.

“Stop serving him Pumpkin Spice shit.” Ronan shifted his glare from Henry to Adam, languidly shifting his body on the counter to face Adam more bodily.

“Oh come on, Ro,” Matthew cajolled, holding the already half-finished cup out to his brother. He gestured it towards him generously, clearly trying to get him to take a taste. “It’s delicious.”

“Death before Pumpkin Spice.”

Something about the way he said it made the entire ridiculous situation sound almost noble. Adam crossed his arms over his apron in a mirror of Ronan’s defensive posture.

“Strong stance, Lynch.”

“It’s a fucking cult, man.” Ronan looked disdainfully down his nose, less at Adam and more at the offending coffee machines.

“Your frogs are cute. Very rad.”

The change in topic was so rapid that Adam did not quite catch Matthew’s words for a moment. It was almost as if he had to play each one over in his head before they settled into cognition. But then they did, and Adam felt a swooping feeling of shame in his stomach as his hands automatically came down just above his knees to hide the frogs from Matthew’s eyes. Matthew’s statement had drawn the attention of Ronan, Henry, and Noah, too. Adam went red. He hadn’t realized how much of a good time he had been having until suddenly he wasn’t. 

Ronan’s gaze on the frogs still visible between his fingers was particularly harrowing and Adam didn’t want to hear what Ronan had to say about them. After returning to his apartment last night, he still had been unable to find his apron despite nearly tearing the room apart and had to settle with Blue’s borrowed apron again. He opened his mouth to explain what had happened, but he couldn’t understand if that would make this better or worse. He couldn’t understand why he was so embarrassed by losing an apron.

And then, as though the universe has conspired against him at this exact moment, Tad Carruthers entered the café.

“Gentlemen!” he greeted jovially. God, Adam thought, was his collar really popped? Tad’s eyes scanned the room and his eyebrows raised as he made a show of looking Ronan up and down. “And Ronan Lynch. Long time.”

If it had been a long time, Ronan clearly wished it had been longer. 

“Funny you’re here,” Tad continued, and Adam wondered if it was ignorance or a lack of self-preservation that kept Tad from recoiling from Ronan’s incendiary expression. “I was just thinking of those Aglionby days. I passed fucking Whelk of all people outside. Do you even remember him? You were barely there before you dropped out.”

“He creeps me out.”

Tad barely looked at Noah. Noah, who rarely spoke up, perhaps because of this sort of potential outcome, slid further back behind the counter. Adam felt a slick of irritation.

“Christ, he’s not looking well these days, is he?” Tad went on, clearly not reading the room. Everyone was looking at him with a less than favorable expression, ranging from Ronan’s downright destructive slant of his eyebrows to Matthew’s grin slowly sliding off to be pocketed for later.

Adam wondered what his expression looked like.

“Apparently he used to be some sort of prince around here before his dad fucked over the government. Always gotta research your investments first, you know?”

“I have a promotional poster with that exact phrase.” Henry oozed sincerity so intense that it couldn’t be anything other than forced. “Can I tempt you with anything, Tad? A latte? A scone, perhaps?”

“A scone?” Tad let out a laugh Adam could only assume had been perfected in private school. “Man, do I look gay to you? Speaking of which, there’s Parrish.” Like with Matthew’s comment about his apron, the room’s attention shifted to Adam. He felt another swoop in his stomach, but this time he could identify the feeling more as a heated aggravation. “Been seeing you everywhere lately, it feels like.”

“Feels like.”

Tad’s face held still for a moment, one eyebrow raised and mouth quirked just slightly before a smile cut into his soft chin like butter.

“You know what,” his eyes pulled from Adam at the last second to glance at Henry. “I could go for a café del Cielo.”

Both Noah and Adam moved to make the drink, but Adam beat Noah to it. He was eager to have something to do with his hands, he feared they would cover the frogs again if not otherwise occupied. The silence in the room felt disportionately weighted, even as Matthew slurped loudly at the bottom of his drink.

Adam finished making the drink without flourish and handed it to Tad. He could not force the muscles of his face into a polite smile, but he figured any expression compared to Ronan’s could be construed as cordial. Tad took the coffee, already made into a to-go cup for Adam’s own sanity, and pulled a long drink from it. He actually made an “ah” noise when he finished and Adam wondered if Ronan would burst into flames.

“Great service here, Cheng,” Tad complimented. Adam suspected that if he had a hat, he’d tip it to Henry. Then, cup still in his grip, Tad dug his wallet out of his pocket and pulled a crisp fifty dollar bill out one-handed. He handed it to Adam, who finished the exchange and dreaded handing the money back to Tad, already anticipating his next move.

As predicted, Tad made a big show of putting the rest of his change in the tip jar. Adam hated this. Adam said nothing.

“I’ll see you guys around, yeah?” Tad said to the room, looking each of them in the eye. He punched Matthew in the shoulder companionably and looked as though he might do the same to Ronan, but pulled his arm back at second thought. “You’re all coming to the Harvest Festival, right? Dad’s been saying this year’s gonna be the best one.”

“Oh, well, if your dad says so.” Ronan’s voice dripped with lighter fluid.

“Right,” Tad said after a pause. He pulled the door open and addressed the room again, “See ya.” He drummed his fingers on the honey-yellow painted edge of the door before letting go.

There was a beat of silence before Henry broke the tension.

“Matthew,” he asked, serious and business-like, “is his hair dyed or natural? It is imperative that I interview everyone with this question for the most conclusive results.”

Matthew gave the matter careful consideration before announcing conclusively, “Dyed.”

Henry nodded sagely at the younger Lynch while Ronan looked at him with mock-hurt.

“You never asked  _ me _ that.”

“You’re bald,” Henry explained flippantly. He looked at Ronan’s shaved head with deep, personal judgment. “Your thoughts on hair are invalidated.”

Ronan did little more than roll his eyes and Adam could see the fire in his posture had reduced to its usual simmer.

“Whatever, it’s time to go,” Ronan said, coming alive as he moved his hip off the counter, stretching his long arms behind him and twisting the hard edged line of his white neck back and forth. “Matthew, pay for your stupid drink already. Or don’t. I don’t give a shit.”

Matthew chuckled amiably, digging a broad hand into the front pocket of his plaid pants to give a handful of loose change and some crumpled bills to Adam. There was a brief moment of awkwardness when Matthew dropped his change into the tip jar and one of the twenties left in there by Tad shifted under their weight.

Not wanting to upset Matthew, and it was clear that Adam’s discomfort did upset Matthew for some reason, Adam waved it off almost imperceptibly. But Matthew caught the meaning anyway and gave Adam another infectious grin before swinging around to meet Ronan by the door. Ronan left without a word, but Matthew gave them all a toothy smile and a wave.

Before he left, he held the door open for Colin Greenmantle, one of Adam’s least favorite regulars at the shop. Unsurprisingly, Greenmantle took his time settling into his usual table by the outlet, pulling his sleek laptop from the expensive leather messenger bag Adam desperately coveted.

The sight of the messenger bag landed Adam more firmly in his foul mood and his eyes caught again on the lurid tip left behind by Tad.

“Jackass,” he said under his breath. However, it clearly wasn’t quiet enough because Henry pulled his mouth into an upside down U shape in disagreement.

“I actually thought Ronan was having one of his more charming days. Or maybe the shine off Matthew just covers up some of Ronan’s more noticeable edges.”

“Not Ronan,” Adam corrected with a sigh. “Tad.”

Henry and Noah looked at Adam. Noah’s head was cocked to the side a little, his nearly white hair shifting into one eye unseeingly. Adam sighed again, dropping his crossed arms to his sides in restless irritation. “Coming in here, treating people like shit and then leaving a tip like he can just get away with it.”

Noah and Henry exchanged a glance for a moment. Noah shrugged a little and Henry just shook his head.

“Oh to be so pretty and stupid,” he said, patting Adam on the shoulder in a friendly way. Then he turned to see Greenmantle clearing his throat and looking at him with a sort of grand impatience over his pointed face.

Adam moved forward to take his order, but Henry shook his head at him again.

“Go find another apron in the back,” he gestured, shooing Adam off amicably. “I got this one.”

Adam slipped into the back of the café, where the air was significantly warmer and smelled pleasantly of sugar cookies. Months of working at the Busy Bee Café had trained Adam’s nose and he could detect a stronger scent of vanilla. Henry must be tweaking his recipe, he thought. For some reason, this settled his nerves more than he would have expected and it was with a brighter feeling that he rummaged through the cabinet for a new apron.

He found one behind a 80’s inspired windbreaker that was so luridly colored it could belong to no one but Henry. Pulling it to his nose, it smelled mostly fine, if a little stale from its time in the cabinet. But it was free of embroidered frogs and he could finally return this one to Blue.

As he transferred items from Blue’s apron to his new one, pen, paper pad, wallet, his phone buzzed.

**9:27 Ronan  
** _ tad is a fcking tool _

Adam wanted to agree, but something about Ronan’s unprompted jibe at Tad made Adam a little defensive. He bit at his chapped lips for a moment, worrying the bottom lip between his teeth before responding.

**9:28 Adam  
** _ He’s not so bad _

Ronan’s response was immediate.

**9:28 Ronan  
** _ dont be nice, we both knw u arent _

Adam should have been indignant at Ronan’s accusation. Instead he stared at the screen until it dimmed, finding some comfort in the call-out. Then he tucked the phone back into his apron and headed back to finish his shift.

* * *

Of all the jobs Adam had ever had, and over the years he had had plenty, he thought perhaps working as an online tarot reader at 300 Fox Way was his favorite. It wasn’t the most prestigious and he never really appreciated the way people would react when he told them about this job. They all tended to either glorify it, looking at him mystically, and he could see them trying to figure out how to get a free reading from him. The other group of people tended to look down on him, and Adam hated himself a little for understanding why. He had nothing but respect for Blue’s family and their collective psychic career, but this was not the job he wanted for himself.

That being said, it was his favorite until he could finally reach his shiny dreams. In addition to getting a chance to work with one of his closest friends, Adam felt comfortable in this cramped and cluttered house in a way that he had never felt in his own cluttered trailer he had grown up in or the cramped attic apartment he lived in now. This house was filled with overflowing bookshelves of books and candles and plants that seemed to thrive on spite alone. The walls were covered in a mash of different colors and patterned wallpapers from room to room with no sort of decorative theme other than to be covered further with more paintings, children’s drawings, masks, interesting wooden carvings, paper mache leaves, silhouette portraits, slips of paper found in library books, postcards from distant friends, and a single autographed picture of Steve Martin. There was a melody of sound constantly playing from the women clinking mysterious items in front of bathroom mirrors, from children engaged in any myriad of arts and crafts projects, from music played from any number of tiny bedrooms on the second and third floors. There was also always a potluck of food in the kitchen that Adam was not just encouraged to eat but also sometimes borderline bullied into eating because “it’s just going to go bad if we don’t get rid of it, like, in an hour.”

Today, he was settled into the laptop/sewing/cat room with a bowl of taco soup in his hands and a particularly fat tabby draped over and warming his bony feet. The household’s ancient laptop sat on the antique sewing table pretending to be a table, gently whirring hot air into the small space. The door was shut to offer some privacy to Adam and Blue as they fulfilled their required hours of online tarot readings, but Adam could still hear Blue’s sister Gwenllian’s nails scraping along the walls as she walked by and the heavy footsteps of Blue’s cousin Orla’s clogs as she paraded around the house on the phone with either one of her several boyfriends or a psychic hotline client. It was hard to tell who it could be based on her voice alone.

There was a particular fervor in the air as the women bustled about in preparation for the Harvest Festival. Maura, Blue’s practical mother, forced them all to have several booths at the festival each year promoting their psychic abilities for the tourists and townspeople who came for caramel apples and pumpkin spice funnel cakes. A few years ago, some of the women complained about the stereotypical nature of performing as psychics near Halloween, but then Maura, ever in charge of the house’s finances, showed them the long list of bills and how the extra income from the Harvest Festival raised their yearly income by close to 30% and the rumblings lowered to little more than a whisper.

This year, Maura and her friend Persephone had splurged a little on a nicer advertisement. Persephone had wanted one of those inflatable dancing monster figures like the ones seen outside of used car lots, but she had allowed Maura to talk her down to the vinyl advertising Persephone’s particular kitchen witchery methods of cromniomancy (divination through onion sprouts), oomantia (divination through eggs), and tiromancy (divination through cheese). Maura leaned more heavily on augury (interpretation of omens), geloscopy (divination from the tone of someone’s laughter), and phyllorhodomancy (a means of divination whereby one slaps a rose petal against the hand and judges the favorability of the omen by the loudness of the sound), but still kept her tarot cards on hand for the less adventurous. Calla, the third in the trio, had drawn the line at a vinyl advertisement for her own brand of psychometry, where she would gain impressions of a person through their physical objects and its history. As Calla always put it, her powers weren’t some party trick. Unless, of course, she was drunk and at a party. Then it was a party trick.

Blue had been trying to convince Adam to join her at her own little tarot table. She had spent most of last weekend with Noah, constructing wood into something that was at least table-shaped if not enough to be formally considered a booth. The two of them had had traces of lilac paint on their persons for days, appearing in unexpected places such as splattered on the delicate curve of Noah’s ear and in the vulnerable crease behind Blue’s knee just above her socks. Adam was still on the fence about attending. On one hand, he looked forward to the tips Blue promised and the chance to see her on a night he was usually holed away studying, but he wasn’t sure yet if he could budget the hours.

From the repeated looks Blue kept giving him every time they could hear Gwenllian screeching outside in the hallway about needing more candles for her booth, he could tell the question was rising in her throat to ask if he had given it more thought. Thankfully, she was busy at the moment on the laptop, her eyes trained on the basic tarot spread in front of her while a digital woman on the screen looked on hopefully. She was in the middle of holding up the ace of pentacles between her fingers when a yell from the first floor made itself known to them.

“Blue! Boy! Door!” 

Calla was her usual brand of insistence, which meant to say that there was probably not a fire but if they did not respond quickly, Calla might start one. Adam and Blue exchanged a glance as if to ask the other if they were expecting someone and they both wordlessly agreed they were not.

“One moment please, ma’am.” Blue sang in her sweet customer service voice before turning the camera and microphone off and leaning her head towards the closed door to screech “WHAT?”

“DOOR.”

“I’M WORKING.”

“DOOR,” Calla repeated in a tone that stated clearly she would not be repeating it again.

“FINE.”

Blue resumed her video and her cool and collected customer service voice returned smoothly.

“Ma’am, I apologize for the wait, but the message the cards was giving me was so strong I had to stop to focus on them entirely.” Adam scoffed just loudly enough for Blue to hear him, but the customer not to catch him at it. Blue flipped him the bird out of the customer’s line of vision as she continued speaking blithely. “I am happy to say the cards have told me it’s all going to work out. Yes, yes, I know it is such a relief. Yes, may the goddesses bless you.”

As she guided the customer through the payment process, Adam cleaned up the spread of tarot cards and crystals he had been laying out artistically for his clients who had requested a written spread over an online reading. The cat at his feet meowed pitifully at the disturbance as he finished and rose from his seat.

“Okay,” Blue nodded, opening the door and allowing the cat to dart out ahead of them. “Let’s go.”

As they walked down the steps, Adam bumped into Blue as she abruptly stopped on the landing four steps above the first floor. Sheer force alone kept her tiny frame from falling down the steps, the afternoon light casting an intricate pattern of colors on her face through the stained glass window.

In the doorframe stood Gansey. He wore a salmon polo and cargo shorts that must have said something deeply offensive to Calla, if her expression was anything to go by.

“What are you doing here?” All trace of Blue’s polite customer service voice was a mere memory at this point.

“Hello Blue, Adam,” he nodded cordially at both of them. “I was curious if you or your family would be willing to talk to me about your contributions to Henrietta? It’s rare for a town to have such a rich psychic community such as yours and I’d be very interested in learning more about your family’s history in this town.”

There was a pause and Adam wished Blue would please finish walking down the steps. But Blue, barely five feet tall in knee socks, seemed to like having the higher ground over Gansey. Gansey looked increasingly uncomfortable with Blue’s undeniable power stance and shuffled his weight from one boat shoe to the other.

“Adam told me to come,” he finally blurted out as explanation.

Blue’s expression could have frozen the Sahara.

“What did you do to me?” she asked Adam over her shoulder. He wondered if it would be to his tactical advantage to move a step or two upwards and away from Blue.

“Didn’t you say I should ask Blue about her family?” Gansey’s gaze asked Adam to save him.

Adam, feeling a little as though he had been thrown under a bus, was careful not to take sides.

“I only meant that I wasn’t the person to ask. If you want info, get it from the source.”

This answer seemed to mollify both of them. Gansey seemed momentarily more comfortable in the doorway and Blue leaned against the banister to look down coolly at her bitten nails painted Frankenstein’s monster green.

“I’m working right now,” she explained. “I can’t talk.”

“Oh, I’m sorry,” Gansey sounded sincere but Adam could tell from the look on his face that he would not be deterred. “Can we schedule another time? Or perhaps there’s someone else here I could talk to?”

“I’d be happy to talk.”

Without even looking up from her nails, Blue snapped. “Orla, get out.”

Adam looked from his spot on the banister to see Orla eyeing at Gansey appreciatively. Her tall body leaned languidly against the wall so that the lowrise waistline of her flared bellbottom jeans exposed a perfect curve of dark skin. From the appraising look she cast over Gansey, she seemed to have no problem with boat shoes.

“Well, if you change your mind,” she purred seductively, falling back behind the french doors to the kitchen and disappearing with a wink.

To his credit, Gansey did not let his eyes linger and only offered her a polite smile before turning his attention back to Blue. This, if nothing else, made her deign to look at Gansey in favor of her chipped manicure.

“Normally I tutor some kids on Tuesday nights but they’re all apparently passing around the flu like a hot potato and their parents already cancelled so I guess I can pencil you in,” she offered with all the complex of a martyr.

Suitably appreciative, Gansey nodded. He and Blue worked out the basic details: no, she would not give him her number; no, she would not give him a definitive time to come over on Tuesday; yes, he would be fine waiting on the porch until she was ready to talk to him.

Gansey left having never passed the threshold. When the door shut behind him, Adam and Blue stayed on the steps for a moment, looking at the solid oak cutting him off from them.

“Will you really make him sit outside for a half hour before you talk to him?” Adam wondered, not willing to put anything past Blue.

“Nah,” she sighed, her shoulders dropping from her ears as she let down her guard. “Only like twenty minutes.” The grin she flashed at Adam was all bright teeth and laughter caught in her cheeks.

“God though,” she continued as she pushed past Adam on her way back up to the laptop/sewing/cat room, “I hate how Gansey dresses like a frat boy. It activates my fight or flight response.”

“He’s not as bad as Tad.”

Blue nodded her head in concession.

“No one is as bad as Tad.” She paused at the door before glancing at Adam curiously. “Wait, did he show up this morning?”

Adam recounted the morning’s events to her as they entered the room. Blue was an excellent audience, rolling her eyes at the appropriate times and shaking her head furiously when Adam mentioned the tip.

“Ugh, he is such a tool!”

Adam didn’t realize he had made a face at her words, but Blue caught on it all the same.

“What?”

“That’s almost exactly what Ronan said.”

“Ronan said that? Like, to his face?” she asked with begrudging admiration. “Man, I wish I could have seen that.”

“No, he texted it to me,” Adam corrected, looking up to see it was Blue’s turn to make a face. “What?”

“You’re texting Ronan?”

The way she asked made it feel so explicit. Adam was half-tempted to pull out his phone, to show her exactly how unremarkable the texts were. That seemed too defensive and would probably lead to a much more time-intensive conversation than he was willing to spend on Ronan.

“I mean, not really. Gansey made him give me his number last night. I told him his music taste sucks—”

“It really does.”

“I know. And then he texted me about how Tad is a tool. I don’t know if that constitutes as  _ texting _ , exactly.”

“Right.”

She clearly looked as though she had more to say on the matter, but Adam was done letting this conversation cut into his time with online clients. Ignoring her gaze, Adam turned his full attention in favor of his own tarot spread and eventually he heard her open the laptop to focus on her own readings.

The rest of the evening passed without incident, though Adam kept his hopes up that his phone would not light up with another text from Ronan and bring Blue’s suspicion back in full force. Adam was glad for the silence.

* * *

“I’m not going to be able to come home for dinner tonight, Dad.”

Tad held his slim phone tight to his ear as he shuffled his feet past another set of cheery little row homes all whimsically decorated for Halloween. As he rounded the corner, he set off a sensor on the last house and light immediately spilled onto his path. On the newly lit sidewalk, he saw trace remnants of a child’s hopscotch pattern. He walked through it, not caring if his shoes scuffed the chalk lines.

“Is everything okay?” Theodore Carruthers sounded immediately concerned on the other end of the line, something paternal hanging off the last letters of his words that sparked an uncomfortable amount of embarrassment in Tad.

“I dropped my wallet somewhere today and now I’m walking around town looking for it. It’s just taking a while since I don’t have my car.”

“You need a ride, son?”

Tad could already guess the lecture his father would give him about being more careful with his belongings and did he cancel his credit cards and he really shouldn’t carry much cash on him when walking around town. He wanted to tell his dad he hadn’t lost any cash, had instead given it all as a tip for an overpriced cup of coffee, but that would have been another lecture he definitely did not want to endure.

“Nah, I should be okay,” he said instead. “Thanks though. Tell Mom I’m sorry.”

On the other end of the phone, Tad heard his father call out. He could picture the scene clearly, his father probably still in his button down shirt and slacks from his usual Saturday hours at the municipal building, but with his tie loose around his neck and his sensible shoes left by the door. He probably was in the living room on the green plaid couch with the soft afghan draped over the back, watching the weekly highlights of college football on ESPN, while his mother puttered around in the kitchen. Tad thought he remembered she told him she was making his favorite meatloaf this week if he wanted to come over and join them.

There was a scuff of noise on the phone, as though his father’s chin clumsily snagged across the receiver. “She said you’re more than welcome to come over tomorrow night for dinner instead.”

More muffled noises followed, the soft sounds of his mother identifiable but her words lost over the connection.

“Or join us after church for lunch,” Theodore amended with a chuckle. Tad had not attended church since high school, minus the occasional sermon on Easter or Christmas to appease his mother. It had become more a teasing joke between himself and his father, Tad telling his mother he was too busy to attend and Theodore wagging a finger at his son to watch out for his damned soul. His mother would smack at his father’s arm teasingly and they’d all laugh, and any unpleasantness caused by the idea of an empty spot beside his parents at church was swept under the metaphorical rug.

“Dinner tomorrow sounds good, yeah.”

“Great! Well, good luck finding your wallet. Talk to you later, kid.”

“Night, Dad.”

As he hung up the phone, he wondered if maybe he should attend church with them the next morning. It wasn’t any major holiday, but the Harvest Festival was coming up and he was as aware as anyone else how eyes would be on his father, the mayor. It would be a nice picture, he thought, sitting in church with his mother and father. Maybe he’d text his sister, see if she wanted to join them. She was a few towns over, but would probably be over this week anyway to help their mother prepare for the festival. What was one more Sunday morning?

His father grilled him constantly about the importance of appearance and Tad was trying to keep up appearances, but the stress of everything, of everyone  _ relying _ on him, had been getting to him as of late. It was making him lose his edge at work during their meetings, he kept picking fights with Alvin in accounting over stupid little problems that did not matter at all once the meetings ended and he was back at his desk, replaying the words in his mind. It was making him obsess over his car, to the point where he had brought it to Boyd’s Mechanics for a tune up when really it probably did not need much at all, but he might drive it in the Harvest Festival parade and he wanted to make sure it was in top condition. It was making him misplace his belongings, losing his essentials (phone, keys, wallet) in the strangest places (sock drawer, medicine cabinet, in the fridge) with no memory of having moved them there.

All the other instances of losing his belongings had been in his own apartment though, this was the first time he had lost his wallet anywhere else. He hadn’t noticed until he had packed up at the end of the day at his desk, his hands tapping automatically at his pockets to make sure his keys, phone, wallet were in place. Irritably, he ground his teeth together. It was a Saturday, he shouldn’t have even been at work in the first place. But he could always hear his father, concerned and chiding all at once, pressing him to put in those extra hours on the weekend.  _ Make sure you’re seen at work, son. Make sure the powers that be see you putting in the time.  _

So Tad had gone to work that day, he had put in his hours, he had waved to his boss who came in just once to pick something up out of her office, he had gotten coffee at Henry’s weird bee cafe, he had stopped to check on his car, he had gone back to work and had not been seen by anyone, he had lost his wallet.

And now, it was dark and growing darker as he moved further and further away from the house with the automatic lights and closer and closer to Boyd’s Mechanics. Fingers just barely clinging to the first chills of the season dug around in his pockets until he unearthed his tangled earbuds, tucking them in neatly to listen to Drake’s  _ Hotline Bling _ as he walked. Even as the music started playing, he could still hear the trace noises of birds tucked away in distant trees. The air carried the heavy scent of promised rain, and Tad tugged his jacket a little tighter around his shoulders. He looked up at the sky as though he could see the impending rain, but the trees around him were broader than he’d expected, branches splitting a thousand times and filtering the little moonlight that escaped through the clouded night. He wondered if maybe he should have taken his father up on his offer of a ride.

But past the tangle of trees, the shop came into view, generically adorned in shades of navy and dull chrome, the parking lot empty save for cars waiting their turn to be fixed and polished and let back into the wild streets of Henrietta. The large garage door was conclusively shut, boosting the shop name in chipped yellow paint, mockingly, as though it was Tad’s fault for his late arrival. But still, Tad let his eyes immediately sweep the area just beside the massive garage door for any sign of Parrish’s bike.

He hadn’t expected to see Adam in the shop the other day, he just liked to stop by whenever his car was in for service. His father talked at length about the importance of being seen and remembered, that his presence would inspire a higher quality of work from others. He remembered his sister, sharp-nosed and perpetually exhausted with him, explaining that it had something to do with accountability when workers could put a face to the product of their labor, or something like that. He hadn’t really been paying attention.

But Adam’s battered bike was not chained to the post and a sudden wash of fresh aggravation came over Tad. Overhead, the neon light of Boyd’s shop shook fuzzily, the high pitched emittance was an annoying crawl in his ears. God, wasn’t that something someone could take care of? Someone should be trimming back these overgrown trees, someone should be replacing faulty light bulbs. What was the point of all of them paying taxes in this town if these blights weren’t going to be dealt with?

The absence of Adam’s bike also brought with it the reminder of seeing him at the coffee shop, irritated and irritating with something like a shine off his high cheekbones. Adam was vacant in a way Tad could never understand, but desperately wanted to for reasons he did not want to look at too closely.

Adam hadn’t been happy about the tip, probably thrown off by Ronan Lynch’s presence in the shop. Tad had not interacted with Ronan much back in their Aglionby days, but he could remember the silences that seemed to simmer off his surface. He’d seen him on and off since Ronan dropped out of school, had even tried to race him once. He had been home from college, his skin crawling from the incessant attention from his parents about his grades (bad) and his social life (excellent, but not what they approved of) and his prospective summer internships (he had shown up for the interview still a little drunk from the impromptu mid-week frat party). Then, paused at a stop light, the draw of the engine beside him dragged his eyes to meet Ronan’s sneer. Ronan alone had not been persuasive, but Kavinsky’s drug-slick expression in the passenger seat had made Tad reckless and charged and ready to race. He hadn’t won, had fumbled a gear shift or maybe just lacked the horsepower from the start.

Tad had liked giving Adam the tip in the same way that he had liked bothering Adam at work. He knew Adam would not say anything in return, would only continue to give him that vacant look he wore so well. And Tad knew that he would leave the auto shop, would leave the cafe, and he would be remembered.

Except now, several hours later, he was regretting his actions. Had that been when he lost his wallet? Should he have taken Henry’s offer of a scone or whatever the hell he had said? Maybe the tip had been too much? He rarely felt embarrassed, embarrassment was far removed in a way that shame had never been. But something slid under his skin at the memory of Adam’s tight expression. He ignored it.

He should have gotten the scone, maybe the muffin. His hunger did nothing to assuage his irritation at the day’s events. He should have stayed in his apartment. He hadn’t even done much at work, his interests more firmly focused on being seen than being productive. He had spent the better part of his day on Facebook, toggling to an impressive looking Excel spreadsheet whenever he heard footsteps. And now, he regretted not ordering food the same way he regretted not taking his dad up for the ride. He could practically taste his mother’s meatloaf now, warm and savory. It was never as good when reheated, but he’d settle for that tomorrow. He licked his lips at the promise.

Another streak of light cut across his path, the headlights of the car pulling into the small parking lot rendering him momentarily blind.

Raising an arm against the light and pulling the earbuds out of his head, he wanted to give in to his first instincts to tell the driver the shop’s closed, stupid, but his father’s reminder about the importance of appearance rang in his mind. So instead, he put on his best Son-of-the-Mayor’s smile and greeted the driver congenially.

Until, suddenly, he recognized the driver.

“Need a ride?”

The driver had rolled down the window in a way that made it clear it was a crank window and Tad was embarrassed by proxy, but the storm was threatening and his feet were tired and he didn’t know if his phone battery would last before he made it back to the apartment. He thought he’d rather die than have to walk around without some sort of music playing.

“Uh, yeah, actually. That would be great.”

The driver nodded, and Tad heard a popping noise of a car door unlocking that immediately sent him back to his mother’s old minivan back when she used to pick him up from little league practices. But any comparison to his mother’s clean and orderly car, usually filled with treats for his teammates and little games to keep him and his sister busy during trips to the grocery store, their grandmother’s house, his sister’s dance recitals, ended as soon as he entered. It smelled vaguely of old fast food, of dirty laundry on the way to a laundromat. It smelled uncared for, unvacuumed. He surprised himself by thinking it smelled  _ lonely _ .

“Don’t forget to buckle up,” the driver reminded him.

Tad forced out a single laugh, trying to brush off this awkwardness as he reminded himself that this was a favor and he would be fine for a short ride. His laugh felt too loud in the silence, untempered by conversation or the radio. He pulled the seatbelt a few times. It was folded in its clasp and didn’t move as seamlessly as he was used to in his Rover, and he ended up a little dislodged in his seat when the yanking finally gave way. Unable to find the fastener by feel alone, he glanced down to fiddle with the buckle until  _ click _ .

And that’s when he saw it. His wallet, smooth buttery leather with his initials clearly branded, caught the moonlight almost perfectly. It was a sheen of silver against the dusty and dirty center console, an obvious transplant that did not belong.

Tad felt a bubble of nervous laughter swell up in him and his first instinct was to crack a joke.  _ Oh, the most expensive thing this car ever saw, I bet. Oh, it must have run off to slum it in here. Oh, I suppose you’ll be wanting a finders fee? _ But then there was a prick on his wrist just barely exposed by his coat from the twist of his body and something cold slid into him. He thought he could feel it spread up his arm, in the joint of his elbow, lost into his shoulder. He could run, he should run. He could not run.

The driver held up his wallet silently and the world swam around this single point of vision. Tad’s mind, always a step behind, was sluggish as the drugs took effect, and he stared and stared until realization broke inside of him, damning and terrifying. The driver, content that Tad understood what he was seeing—the personal  _ violation _ of it—returned the wallet to the exposed pocket of Tad’s peacoat. Horror and realization battled for dominance over Tad’s expression, but cold numb fear won out in the end, and he found that though he desperately wanted to speak, he couldn’t. The last thing he saw before he slumped boneless in the passenger seat were the dashboard lights, uniform and colorful and blurry, blurry,  _ gone _ .

* * *

It was dark when Adam finally left 300 Fox Way. There was a tupperware container of peanut butter casserole in his messenger bag promised to go bad if not eaten in the next twelve hours and he thought about how he cleared at least enough money tonight to get groceries tomorrow for the week. All together, he mused, it had not been a bad end to the day.

He rode his bike back to his apartment over St. Agnes church, and, even with taking all the shortcuts, he could not reach his apartment before he could feel the inevitable exhaustion settling into his bones. The wind was cool on his skin, overwarm from the pleasant stuffiness of Blue’s house. He could feel the last traces of warmth siphoned from his exposed knuckles as he pedaled his way past a snag of trees. A smattering of Halloween lights blinked out at him from houses just beyond the line of trees he rode beside, the orange and purple blinking in and out rapidly from sight.

The wind picked up in snatches, pulling his hair in contrary directions, and he could smell rain and electricity brewing in the threatening clouds above. The mixture of it all was downright apocalyptic and he was eager to get inside to his apartment and away from his vulnerable exposure to the atmosphere. He felt an unexpected relief when the steeple of the church emerged over the autumnal tree tops as he rounded the final hill.

Adam let the bike coast down the hill a little dangerously, not bothering to put on the brakes until the last moment. He felt the bike wobble a little as he made the final sharp turn into the church parking lot, but he managed to right himself before falling. He swung his leg up and over the bike, walking it back behind the quiet white church and past the garden to the back entrance where the narrow wooden staircase would lead him to his room.

The wind whistled again, managing to sift through his hair to his scalp and causing goosebumps to erupt violently across his arms under his sweater. The leaves around the church rustled madly and the fluttering leaves disrupted something shot out into the night. Caught up by the wind and the unsettling nature of the weather, fear spiked in Adam’s heart before he registered it was just some furry animal displaced by the wind in the leaves.

He laughed a little at himself to have let himself get so caught up in the weather and continued to pull his bike alongside him to the back entrance. But as he passed the tiny garden around the statue of the Virgin Mary, something snagged in his peripheral vision and he turned.

Adam’s entire body locked in place.

His mind was slower than his eyes. He seemed to see everything all at once, sprawled legs unnaturally laid out on the ground and limp arms spread as though grasping for something just out of reach, before his brain made sense of it all. It was a body. It was a dead body. There was no chance any life could be left in someone so  _ still _ . It was unnatural. It was terrifying.

Beneath the white haze of fear and shock clouding his mind, Adam knew he needed to move. Needed to leave. Needed to find people and help. But instead he found himself creeping closer to the body stretched out on the ground among Mary’s garden, head and identity tipped away in the shadows.

It was a man, probably Adam’s age. He wore expensive jeans and a coat that might have been green, navy, or black, it was too dark to tell. But what caught Adam’s eye was his face. The exposed neck was tilted back, something dark and slick caught the meager moonlight even as it very slowly dripped down the pale skin of the throat. The chin was coated with the same terrifying matter and suddenly there was an open gash where the mouth should have been. It was such an outrageously incongruous sight that Adam’s eyes could barely see it, could barely let the image make sense in his mind. He felt himself gag and forced himself to look away and focus on the rest of the face. That same moonlight making a lighted path of horror against the concealing blood also dusted along the voluminous tuft of hair at the top of the head. Beneath it, the eyes were open, just starting to go flat and milky, the bright hazel-green starting to fade. Adam didn’t know eyes did that when you died, started to lose their color, the thought darting into his mind unbidden.

Adam felt terrified tears prick his own eyes because even dead, Tad Carruthers looked so fucking scared.

Numbly, his fingers found his phone in his bag and he selected a contact and hit the dial button without a thought. He didn’t know how long the phone rang, wasn’t even sure how long he was willing to stand there letting the phone ring into his good ear, his deaf ear exposed and useless to the world around him where a killer existed. He was just about to hang up when, finally, Ronan picked up with an irritated huff.

“What?”

“There’s a body.” Adam’s words were immediately queued up.

A pause before Ronan spoke again, this time lower and closer to alarm.

“What?”

“There is a body,” Adam repeated, his mind a rush of thoughts, each one layering on top of another until he could not prioritize any of them and just let the words fall out of his mouth. “I don’t know what to do. I didn’t know who else to call.”

“Okay,” Ronan said slowly, maybe thoughtfully if Adam had room enough in his brain to process it. “What do you need?”

What did Adam need? A time machine, a place to scream, a place to empty the contents of his stomach.

“Come to St. Agnes.”

“ _ Where? _ ”

“ _ St. Agnes _ , Ronan. I know you know where it is.”

“Yeah.” Ronan sounded so very far away. “Yeah, I’ll come help.”

Adam felt a rush of relief so thorough he thought his knees might actually give way under him. His eyes were still on Tad, still locked in place on the spot where Tad’s mouth should be. But he could hear frantic rustling on the other end of the line, a reminder that the entire world was not dead. Other people were alive. Other people were going to help him.

“You really don’t have anyone else you could call?” Ronan asked, incredulous.

Wild laughter was ripped from Adam; he was hysterical.

“ _ You have a carrion bird as a pet. _ I assumed you’d know what the fuck to do in this situation.”

Ronan did not respond to that. Adam could hear a car door open on Ronan’s end.

“Get in your car and lock the doors.”

“I don’t have a car.” His bike was on the ground behind him, fallen on the ground from where he had dropped it in shock.

Another long pause and Adam could hear Ronan swearing under his breath before finally, “There’s an alcove near the back of the church. Can you stand there? Stand there with your back to the corner.”

Adam nodded before he realized Ronan could not see him. He swallowed hard at the dryness in his throat. Something about Ronan’s order made the feeling return to his legs.

“Yeah.” Adam walked from his spot before Tad’s stretched body, and his legs ached as though he hadn’t moved in years.

“Do that,” Ronan snapped. It was something out of fear, not unkindness, and Adam let Ronan’s ferocity be a balm to his tattered heartbeat as he moved to the alcove. “Stay in the light, stay on the phone. I’ll be there in a few minutes.”

Adam leaned his back painfully to the corner of the alcove, the two walls pressing against his shoulder blades as they held him upright. He could barely see Tad’s body from this spot beneath the faintly flickering light. A few bugs not yet killed by the autumn frost moved around him, their buzzing blending in with the electricity of the lightbulb. The incense from the church seemed to surround him in his state of over heightened sensations. His phone was tight in his grasp, the screen still lit up with Ronan’s name as both men refused to hang up.

His ears strained for the sound of tires on the parking lot and every noise seemed amplified in the night. True to his word, Ronan was there within several drawn out minutes. Adam could nearly vomit with relief as the glow of the headlights swung over him before turning off with the engine.

Eyes dazzled by the headlights, he could barely make out more than Ronan’s tall form slowly making its way to him. Even as his vision adjusted again to the darkness, he could see Ronan still as he took in the sight of Tad’s body by the statue.

Ronan was so still, it terrified Adam. He was nearly stone except for the almost imperceptible shiver in his locked muscles as he stared and stared and stared.

Adam moved from his spot in the alcove, not sure if Ronan would be upset with him for moving, but he could not stand there any longer while Ronan remained unmoving.

Cautiously taking muted steps in the grass and willing his eyes not to drift to Tad’s lifeless body, Adam started tentatively. “Ronan—”

Ronan snapped back to life so immediately Adam felt a rush of dizziness. His eyes were startlingly blue even in this darkness, chips of ice that stared into Adam so thoroughly he could feel their chill on his skin.

“Are you okay?” he asked as ferociously as he had ordered Adam to move the alcove, demanding an answer from him.

“Wha—” Adam was taken aback by the sudden life in Ronan’s form before answering automatically. “Yeah. I’m okay.”

“ _ Liar. _ ”

Adam let the condemnation settle for a moment.

“No. No, I’m freaking out. I don’t know what to do.”

Adam so very rarely felt this out of control, so very rarely felt so unsure of what to do. He did not like this, did not like Ronan to bear witness to what felt like an impending breakdown. He did not want Tad’s body to witness any more horror.

Ronan gave a smoker’s breath: a deep inhalation through flared nostrils, slow exhale through parted breath.

“Fuck.” The swear came out on a sigh.

The silence dragged on until Adam thought he might vibrate out of his skin with the anticipation. Finally Ronan sighed again, dragging a large hand down his face and neck, clutching at a small gold cross on a chain around his neck.

“I gotta call Declan.”

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> THE HORROR IS FINALLY HERE. Don't get me wrong, I like a good coffee shop AU as much as the next person, but horror is where I truly shine. It's only going to get darker from here on in, folks!


	4. Chapter Four

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Apologies for the late post! This weekend was not necessarily a bad weekend but my god was it hectic. Next week's chapter is still scheduled to come out on Sunday as per usual.
> 
> Also, thank you to aleksandr_starshow! You make this whole imagining and writing process so much more fun and you make the story so much better with your edits and comments and gentle nudges in the right direction. Seriously, how much time did we go over talking about just Tad? Your comments on him and how he fits into this world helped me so much with some of the connections I had been wanting to make and hadn't been sure how to do it. Thank you, thank you!

**Chapter 4 (Saturday, October 7)**

Whatever Ronan had been expecting, it hadn’t been this.

The world was a swirl of color around him as his body halted. He shook violently in his boots and could feel cold seeping into his bones, his veins, his very synapses. It creeped up the sides of his rib cage and froze his lungs until he thought he might choke on it.

His car cooling down in the parking lot behind him, Adam a dark line of nerves under the light in the church alcove, the Virgin Mary an anchor in the middle of a nightmare, it all fell away to a single pinpoint: the body in the garden. It was like an overlaid image, technicolor and fake, superimposed over this figure. It was the weak moonlight of dusk, it was the early light of day. It was St. Agnes, it was the Barns. It was this unknown body, it was his father.

All it took to bring him back to this body was the sight of Adam stepping closer to him, backlit from the white light of the alcove. His hair, messy and unevenly cut, was a haze around his face, his unusual features made ghoulish and dramatic under the moonlight. Adam tentatively called out his name.

“Ronan—”

“Are you okay?”

He heard the harshness in his words and regretted it, but he could not find another voice in his mouth to replace it with. He wanted to grab Adam’s shoulders, press his thumbs to the soft spot where his arm met his chest and drag him away from this.

“Wha—” Adam flickered before his eyes, faltering for a moment before shuttering away from Ronan’s hard stare. “Yeah. I’m okay.”

“ _ Liar. _ ”

The shake of Adam’s head was a reverberation of movement, slow and weighted as he visibly took stock of their surroundings.

“No. No, I’m freaking out. I don’t know what to do.”

Adam sounded young in that moment in a way he never had before and Ronan felt the surge in his arms again. He kept his arms at his sides. Ronan permitted himself nothing more than to breath out heavily, his favorite word a comforting salve.

“Fuck.”

“What?”

Adam’s voice was a prompt he could not ignore. He sighed, dragged his hand down his face and neck to bring sensation back to his skin, and let his fingers tangle in the small gold cross on a chain around his neck. His hands snagged on the edges for something to do.

“I gotta call Declan.”

“ _ Declan? _ ”

"My asshole cop brother.”

He clawed his phone out of his pocket, careful to keep his eyes trained away from the body, Jesus fuck there was a  _ body _ . But even as his thumb hovered over Declan’s contact in his phone, his fingers slipped at the last moment and he called the police tip line instead.

It rang three times before finally a smooth, cool voice answered. “Hello?”

“There’s a body at St. Agnes church. It’s a man. Young.” He pitched his voice just a little lower to distort his natural tone.

Adam’s eyes did not leave him and Ronan held his eyes, desperate to keep Adam focused on him.  _ Don’t look at the body. Don’t look at the body. _

“Okay, what’s your name and number?”

Ronan let out a sound that might have been a laugh, might have been a scathing sigh, might have been a curse. “Yeah, fuck you. Just thought you guys would want to know.”

He hung up the phone without anything further and Adam’s eyes did not leave him.

“That’s how you talk to Declan?”

“Yeah, actually, but that wasn’t Declan.”

Adam said nothing in response, and Ronan’s eyes flicked away from him and ghosted over the body in the garden. It was a body, it was his father, everything was brighter colors smothering him.

“The police are coming. I cannot fucking stay here. Let’s go.” Each sentence was an entirely separate paragraph pared down to its single thesis.

He expected Adam to resist, to say they couldn’t leave the body or something equally stupid and noble, but Adam only nodded, eyes very far away. Adam’s hands flexed, fingers extended away from him, and Ronan watched them retract slowly and disappear into his sleeves of his worn sweater before bunching the fabric around his hands. It was too much and he looked away at once. He moved back towards the car, certain Adam was following him, when his eyes found the body again.

“ _ Don’t look _ ,” Adam snapped suddenly. But Ronan already saw more of the body than he had allowed himself to see previously. The sight of all that blood made his stomach churn and he wanted to rewrite his brain to the moment before he saw it.

Even as Ronan was caught on the spread of a thick, dark smear along a throat, Adam’s sweater-covered hand moved violently into his space as though to grab him. His hand never landed, but it caught Ronan’s attention all the same.

“You shouldn’t have to see that.”

Adam’s tone wasn’t exactly nice, but Ronan thought he knew where it came from.

“You called me here,” Ronan reminded him mulishly, staring at Adam’s extended hand with a curled lip before Adam let it drop back to his side.

“You’re right. I’m sorry—”

“I don’t want to hear that, I want you to get in the car.”

He did not wait for Adam to argue, but snatched up the bike and wheeled it to the car. Quickly, finally, they away from the body, away from the garden. Ronan popped open the trunk and put the back seat down for Adam to maneuver his bike around the heaps of tools, equipment, and Matthew’s lost hoodie left in there, and then they both slid into the car silently.

Ronan slid in the key and the car turned on with a slow rumble that brought him back to his skin. Over the heat pulsing through the vents, he thought maybe he could hear sirens. He turned to Adam who was still staring in the direction of the body. The dashboard lights reflected warm and soft on his lower lip, his high cheekbones. Ronan saw the shine of them in his unfocused eyes.

“Where to?”

* * *

After the darkness and stillness of St. Agnes’s garden, Nino’s Pizzeria’s neon lights and packed tables were surreal at best. Adam struggled to wrap himself around his settings, vinyl seat beneath him, laminated menu in his hands, chipped beige mug on the formica-and-chrome table in front of him. He’d been to Nino’s plenty of times before, but it was a different planet tonight.

“How’s the pizza here?” Ronan’s question came from behind the menu. He flipped it around to check the back and his face was revealed to Adam, casual as though this were any other night that the two of them decided to just get pizza together on a whim. That idea was foreign to Adam, too.

“What? Fine. I don’t know, it’s pizza.”

Ronan made a thoughtful humming noise to himself, still reading over the different pies advertised.

“Do they burn the crust to shit?”

Having only ever eaten the pies customers had rejected that Blue would give him during her shifts while he sat hunched over a back booth studying and barely registering the food he ate, Adam could give no helpful answer.

“I mean,” Ronan finally looked up from the menu to look at Adam and raise one eyebrow caustically, “if the pizza sucks it’s really just going to fuck up my whole night.”

Adam didn’t laugh. Sudden trauma obviously hadn’t improved Ronan. As for him, he sat hypersensitive under the unrelenting lights of the pizzeria, trying not to think of Tad’s red, shiny, empty face.

A bored-looking waitress arrived at their table, hair sticky with static electricity and a nametag that read Cialina, to take their order. Ronan ordered a large supreme, “Go heavy with the toppings, yeah,” and an order of fries without consulting with Adam. Adam found he did not care though. His stomach could barely process the idea of food at the moment so Ronan could order whatever pleased him.

“How can you eat right now?” Adam looked at him a little dazed, a little grossed out after the waitress left.

“Growth spurt.” Ronan shrugged. He leaned further back against the vinyl seat and stretched one long leg under the table. It did not touch Adam, but he could see Ronan’s boot out of the corner of his eye beneath him, just barely blocking him in from the rest of the room.

The next look he gave Adam was appraising and Adam willed himself not to shrink down.  _ Don’t give anything away. _

“How did you know I’d know where the church was?” It was clear from the very carefully casual way he asked it that Ronan had been wanting to ask for a while.

For a moment, Adam considered lying.  _ Didn’t you grow up in Henrietta, so shouldn’t you just know it? What, is your phone too fancy for GPS? Don’t you spend all your time with Gansey and his encyclopedic information of basic community pillars in town? _ Any of these would have worked, but to his own surprise, Adam found the answer he gave to be the truth.

“I’ve seen you there,” he explained shortly, tagging on an amendment for clarification at the last moment. “For Sunday church.”

“Mass,” Ronan corrected, though the words came out automatically rather than critically.

“For Sunday mass,” Adam amended. Ronan was still looking at him with his electric eyes, one arm stretched along the back of the booth, and Adam felt himself continue. “I’ve seen Matthew with you. And the other guy. Another brother? Declan?”

Ronan’s face came alive with a snarl.

“Declan.” He said  _ Declan _ on the precarious edge between a dark swear and a petulant child’s whine.

“The one you talk to like an asshole.”

“He  _ is _ an asshole.”

He said it with such enormous truth in his voice that there was no room left for Adam to say anything else.

Ronan took Adam’s silence as some sort of agreement, a vindicated acknowledgement that, yes, Declan’s assholishness transcended actually knowing him. With his free hand, he reached out to the mug in front of him on the table. He did not pick it up, but instead idly drew a long finger up the side, tracing around the top, before lazily spinning in the circle of the handle. It was a nervous gesture in anyone else, but in Ronan’s hands it was simply a way to pass time.

“What about you?”

“What about me?”

“Your family.” Ronan rolled his eyes, clearly under the impression that Adam should be better at translating his vague questions. “Should you call them or something?”

“I don’t talk to them.”

Adam kept his voice neutral, unperturbed. He hated Ronan, for just a moment, for his luxury to vocalize his contempt for his brother while Adam was shamed to silence. The hateful and hated part inside of him wanted Ronan to pry, dig deeper into how Adam’s family had combusted and left him as charred remains.

But Ronan only shrugged and said, “Well, you gotta find somewhere else to stay. The police are going to be crawling all over St. Agnes.”

The news was not surprising to Adam, who had realized this in the car on the way to Nino’s. But the sweeping reminder once again flushed his skin in a mix of shame for not having a place to go and sickness as he thought again of Tad’s missing face. He was saved the opportunity of answering by Blue arriving with their food.

Adam wasn’t quite sure how a pizza could be placed on a table disrespectfully, but Blue somehow managed.

“I want the other waitress,” Ronan said. He gave Blue a contemptuous look she took pleasure in returning.

“Too bad, I’m who you get.” She swung her hands in the air in a  _ what can you do about it? _ motion before turning to Adam with an accusatory expression. “Adam. Do we need to have a conversation about bringing unsavory types into my life and places of work?”

“Oh Jesus,” Ronan cut in, “you basically neutered Gansey when he went to your poverty palace and you think that’s Parrish’s fault? Don’t act like you didn’t enjoy it.”

Blue’s eyes narrowed into dangerous slits at the phrase  _ poverty palace _ .

“Don’t make me refuse you service.”

“Nobody likes a bigot, Sargent.”

“Don’t be such a shithead.” Again, she turned to Adam to look at him imploringly. “Please don’t tell me you guys are friends now.”

“Blue.” Her name in his mouth was an entire conversation at once and she was immediately deflated in its wake. “Can I stay at your house tonight?”

“I— Sure,” she fumbled, though it was clear her answer was sincere even if it was hastily given. She looked hard at Adam, her spiky brows drawn together with suspicion and concern. Ronan was given an equally hard glance for a half second that he glared at before her attention returned bright and concentrated on Adam. “What happened?”

Adam shook his head tight, quick. It was more of a shudder.

“Not here.”

“Okay.” Blue flicked her eyes back and forth between Adam and Ronan, clearly trying to divine the situation as though she was her mother or any of the other women at 300 Fox Way. But she was not and could not, and so she shook her head and stepped back from the table.

Adam didn’t realize he had felt caged in until she stepped away.

“I’m done here at 11.” The neon clock read half-past eight. “You got your bike? We can head back then.”

“I can give you a ride.”

Even in a night of surprises, Adam could not have expected Ronan’s offer. Neither, apparently, could Blue. Her intimidation tactics could best be described as performance art as she swiveled to Ronan with her hands on her hips.

“No, it’s fine,” Adam started, calming down a situation before it even began. “I’ve got…”

He trailed off as he dug through his bag for his school supplies. He remembered now, he had not packed them when he left for the Busy Bee Café this morning, he had not expected to need them at 300 Fox Way. He had carefully budgeted his time for the day to allow him the rarity of leaving his textbooks in his apartment to focus on them when he returned home for the night instead of lugging them around with him all day.

“Fuck.”

The night was boiling within him and his hands burned with an itch to throw something off the table. His mug, the mug Ronan had invisibly anointed with his touch, anything. He pressed his palms together very tightly in his lap, breathing heavily through his nose, until his fingers started to ache comfortingly with the pressure of his own grip.

The thought of sitting at a table in Nino’s for hours without a book to focus on or money to order more food ran alongside the memory of Tad’s ruined face. Adam hated himself until Blue’s small, cool hand rested on his knotted fingers.

With all the caution and compassion of someone approaching a wounded animal ready to lash out, “Adam, let Ronan be a decent human being for once and go to my house. Sleep on the couch. You look like you need it.”

Ronan’s boot on the floor beside his leg pivoted on his heel, and though Adam could not feel the weight of it against his leg, the toe of the boot brushed at the outside seam of his jeans. This and Blue’s hand, dark and patient on his, brought him back.

“Okay.” He swallowed. “Yeah. Okay.” Each sentence was an abortive attempt to bring words to his thoughts.

Satisfied for the moment, Blue let her hand drift up to his shoulder and the backs of her fingers brushed against the shell of his hearing ear. She left them with their pizza, still steaming between them.

They ate in silence, one slice after another. Despite his earlier aversion to food, it appeared even extreme acute stress could not completely squash Adam’s constant hunger.

“So, does the pizza ruin your whole night?” Adam did not usually speak first, but the sick realization that he had dragged Ronan into this mess clawed the attempts at conversation out of him guiltily.

Ronan shrugged and around a mouthful of mushroom, sausages, and tomatoes said, “It didn’t make it worse.”

His eyes met Adam’s and the guilt flared in Adam again to see the hollowed out look in Ronan’s expression. The faint shadows always present under his eyes were somehow starker in contrast against his pale skin, as though this single hour of time had cost him several nights of sleep.  _ Slept debt _ , Adam thought errantly.

“ _ Fuck.  _ This is really fucked up. I didn’t like Tad, but…”

He trailed off and trusted Ronan to interpret the unspoken words. Ronan had not reacted strongly when Adam told him in the car who the body had belonged to when it had been a person and not a corpse. His hands had gripped the wheel a little harder, their turns taken a little tighter, and Adam had watched the speedometer crawl up in a detached manner.

“It’s some shit, yeah,” was all Ronan contributed.

It was all that could be said, but it was not enough. Adam felt suddenly thrown back into his body and out of the shocked numbness that had plagued him since he had first called Ronan. An immediate and sudden desperation to know the truth made a monster of his insides.

“Who would do this?” he hissed, not caring that Ronan’s eyes looked alarmed with his apparent change.

“Fuck if I know, man.”

And with that, Ronan dumped the rest of the fries into the pizza box. Two slices remained, the melted cheese cooling off and fusing to the cardboard base. Debris of toppings looked like casualties in the oily outlines of the missing slices. He closed the lid, almost snapping it shut in Adam’s face, and stood up so fluidly from the booth that Adam was left blinking after him for a moment before his own body moved more jerkily behind him.

They fumbled through paying the bill, Adam digging into his reserved stash of cash in the lining of his messenger bag for emergencies. He had not budgeted pizza into his weekly spending but for once could not find the spare energy to care. Then they walked into the parking lot, gaudily lit from the streetlights, pop music crackling from the outdoor speakers attached under Nino’s neon sign.

It took only the length of the parking lot to Ronan’s car for the two of them to fall into the familiar pattern of arguing.

“Take it.” Ronan leaned against the driver’s side of the BMW, biting at the leather bands around his wrist.

“We split the cost.”

Adam shoved the box towards Ronan who just lifted his arms up in refusal before smoothing his palms against his shaved scalp to rest at the back of his head. He looked down at Adam with a savage smile.

“If I take it, Chainsaw will just get into it. She can’t eat this garbage, she needs to keep her figure.”

“Let me pay you back,” Adam insisted, already balancing the pizza box on one outstretched hand as he reached into his messenger bag with his other hand.

“Put the damn money away.” Ronan once again made a spectacle out of rolling his eyes. “Just take it. I’m worried you’re going to waste away to nothing in front of my eyes and I really don’t need my dead body count to go up to two today.”

Adam’s hand stilled.

“Don’t be such a shithead,” he muttered out of the corner of his mouth, but he knew then that it was useless to fight this.

The shithead in question let out a mirthless sort of laugh, but unlocked the door. For the second time that night, Adam slid into Ronan’s car. This time, Ronan let his shitty music pour from his speakers and the noise encapsulated Adam, the vibrations a comfort against his tired skin. The smell of the pizza mixed horribly with the overpowering scent of boy and gasoline, but Adam shut his eyes and let Ronan drive.   
  


* * *

Kavinsky was going to kill Lynch.

Something acrid and chemical churned in his chest, only traces of it expelling from him as he blew a mouthful of smoke out the open window of his car. He was left with something lingering behind, something he could not put away, and he pulled on the joint again.

He blew another cloud of smoke into the air, billowing white masses dissipating into the nothingness he desired until some woman walking by made the mistake of eye contact. He could taste her disapproval even under the heady presence of weed and coke and whatever else still festered in his veins, so he blew her a lazy kiss and refused to look away.  _ Judgmental bitch _ .

She broke first, he knew she would, and distantly through his haze he heard her heels clacking uselessly on the sidewalk.

_ Go ahead _ , he thought,  _ call the fucking cops.  _ He didn’t care enough to remember if Skov was on duty tonight, but it didn’t matter.  _ No one can fucking touch me, cunt. _

Across the street, Kavinsky could see Lynch through the windows of Nino’s making puppy eyes at some white trash cheap fuck, and he wanted to run his car through the window. He could picture it perfectly: the bumper car sound of his car as it met near death against the front of the building being drowned out by the magnificent shatter of the glass; the rain-like shards falling down on the scene in pretty silver slivers, slashing at any skin not covered by the fallen table, the scattered bits of building; the fear in everyone’s eyes and the understanding that would inevitably flood in Lynch’s, thinking he could have prevented this, thinking this is where he really belonged.

_ You’re a bomb, man, like me. _

He pictured the scene in masterful technicolor in his head, the weed letting all the colors smear together fluidly in widescreen imagination and the coke letting his head pick up more and more details that snagged tiny corners of the action scene. Red droplets like rubies sprinkled over a shattered windshield. The ice in Lynch’s eyes. A single scream immediately cut off. This rambled smoothly in his head as he traced his wrist over the arc of his steering wheel over and over and over. The imagined thought of what Ronan’s boots might sound like as he stomped over the pieces of glass to enter the Mitsubishi was cut off by the realization that Lynch was on the move.

Lynch exited the pizzeria and the skin of his leather jacket reflected back the red glare of the neon sign. Kavinsky was the devil, but Lynch was a demon.

He was still flanked by that pitiful creature, something skinny and sad looking in a cheap-as-shit sweater. In a more generous mood, Kavinsky might have wanted to put him out of his misery like a lame dog, but tonight he just wanted to burn it all down in a wash of flame and light and this broiling rage inside of him. His lip curled as the other one entered the passenger side of the BMW.  _ Don’t touch what doesn’t belong to you. _

Somewhere, under the cloud of bored fury coloring his every thought, he recognized him as the guy who had left Gansey’s shithole warehouse. Something nasty burrowed in his mind. Maybe Lynch had finally realized Dick III wasn’t gonna fuck him good enough.

Bulgarian rap music poured out of his speakers and made his blood thump with the bass. He thought about turning the key, revving the engine, making them fucking see him watching them. He thought about following them, about turning the buzz in his veins into road beneath his tires as he followed Lynch’s car just a little too close.

But no, Lynch was never as much fun when there was an audience. Kavinsky would let him have this little drive home. Lynch could have his precious little date, could pretend he was a good little boy all polished and pretty for general consumption.

But Kavinsky knew the truth of him. He knew what he was. And he knew he’d come back. It had been years, but he would come back.

And if he didn’t, then Kavsinky could find him. He always found him.

Kavinsky palmed the front of his jeans as he thought how he’d make Lynch make it up to him. He wasn’t sure if he wanted to take charge, take hold of that shaved head. Or maybe he’d lay back, make Lynch do all the work. It didn’t matter, he wasn’t picky. All he really cared about was Lynch’s mouth, wet and warm and  _ his _ .

_ I am going to fuck you up. _

He sat in his car, very still and arms heavy. The world slid bleary and wet and spattered through the smooth, unbroken surface windshield, the rain had finally come through on its threat. He felt the release of his muscles, his jaw relaxed enough for breath to slide warmly over his bottom lip, his fingers were numb. On the radio, the song was playing, the song was playing, the song was playing.

Time wasn’t real and his body was barely his, but he felt the world flicker alive at the sound of knuckles against his window. He thought it might be Skov, Prokopenko, he thought it might be Lynch. Maybe Lynch had seen him after all and came crawling back. Slowly, he rotated his skull against the back of his headrest to face his intruder.

“Back so soon? You run through the whole stash already?” He remembered what he’d sold. He’d always been quick. “You fuck ‘em good?” His mind rushed through the image of Lynch down on his knees in front of that skinny white trash.

“That’s not what I do.”

“I don’t give a fuck, man. State your business or get the fuck away before I run you over. Makes no difference to me.”

They didn’t respond, but instead gestured to the empty passenger seat. Kavinsky felt a wet grin across his unfeeling cheeks.

“Step into my office.”

He thought he had more product in the trunk, but maybe they’d negotiate, maybe he could upsell a little more, help them branch out to some new highs, new levels of blissful forgetting. They slid into the seat already fully set back. It was Proko’s spot when they drove, loose limbed and splayed out until they’d pull over and he’d curl over the console, obedient and eager.

They settled in and glanced down. The bud was still in the sticky cup holder, but the flamed tip had long gone out.

“Where are my manners?” Kavinsky crooned broadly, shifting in his seat to dig in his pockets for a lighter. It was a cheap plastic one, the colors of the Irish flag scrapped and used between his weed-clumsy fingers. It wasn’t his favorite lighter, he hadn’t been able to find it that day. Prokopenko probably had it.

He lit the joint to life again, taking a long drag before handing it over to them. They refused and instead pulled out a familiar looking syringe. They held it in their hands for a while, thoughtfully, carefully. Kavinsky didn’t have the constitution for thoughts and care.

“You gonna have some fun or are you just going to be boring about it?”

They seemed to make up their mind and handed the syringe over. Kavinsky raised an eyebrow at them, but they simply stared back like a blank slate. So he accepted the needle, took another drag off the joint. He blew smoke directly into their face and slid the needle under his skin.

“You always this fucking chatty?” he asked, already laughing dizzily as they waved the smoke away.

The world was already something different, he realized dimly.

As though he were someone else, he watched them take the syringe from his unprotesting hands, take the nearly dead joint from his limp fingers. He thought maybe they’d take a shot from the syringe too, share in the sensation, but instead they tucked it away into a dark pocket and pulled back a lighter.

His lighter, he thought. Silver and small and engraved with the words  _ Dream Killer _ . He didn’t care what this meant, he didn’t care about anything at all.

_ Kill your brain. _

He settled down in his seat to sleep, to dream.

_ Dying’s a boring side effect. _

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I love writing Kavinsky. I love it so much. If I make it through this fic in one piece, I might write a Kavinsky story because, god, it was cathartic.
> 
> I do want to mention something important though. So, poor dumb jackass Tad is dead and he was lgbtqia-undefined, and now Kavinsky is... well, he's not dead yet but you guys are smart and I think you can figure out this isn't going to end well for him. Kavinsky is also lgbtqia-undefined. I want to make it clear that I am not interested in killing all or only lgbtqia characters in this story. The first two characters approached by the killer have been lgbtqia, but that's not going to be an ongoing theme in this story. When plotting it out who is murdered when and why they are murdered, it worked out this way, but I promise it is not my intention for this to be a "bury your gays" story.


	5. Chapter Five

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Huge thank you to aleksandr_starshow for not just editing and supporting, but all the stuff in between. It was a really horrible week and there was a chance the story wasn't going to happen, but you helped me organize and focus and I'm back with a much greater enthusiasm for this story than I've had in a while. Thank you so much!

**Chapter 5 (Sunday-Monday, October 8-9)**

_ Sunday, October 8 _

That night, Ronan dreamt of Adam.

Ronan knew it was a dream for the glamour that Adam managed, the look of his lip just then. He was something  _ other _ and Ronan did not know how something  _ other _ felt, didn’t know how  _ others _ were supposed to feel, and he imagined there was no mercy in them, in Adam. Adam stood above Ronan, bent over him for so long Ronan began to mistake him for the sky. In his hand was a long spear of gold and fire sat luminous at the fine point. He thrust it into Ronan’s chest where his heart should be and Ronan was on fire with the sweetness of his excessive pain. Consciousness disappeared from him. All he could hear was Adam’s halted breath with the impetus of repetitive stabbing into Ronan. He smelled nothing but the final trace of summer left on Adam’s skin tanned by Henrietta’s sun.

Ronan could do little more than open and reopen his mouth, slick with spit and dumb as halos as he let out a strangled cry. He could feel himself lifting from whatever surface Adam had him draped over and wanted to ascend feather-light into the blinding white above.

“ _ Mutatis mutandis _ ,” Adam murmured. His hand stretched the distance between them to trace the very edge of a tattooed hook crawling over Ronan’s shoulder. His finger, long and pointed with intent, punctuated with large knuckles, hovered just above the ink and Ronan felt pierced even before the touch landed.

“ _ Mutatis mutandis _ .”

Ronan was ripped violently from his dream and away from Adam by the shrill beeping of his phone. Tears messily tracked down his face as he fought back against the bone-deep weakness heavily settled within his joints.

He was dumb and his limbs were as unfocused as a newborn lamb as he nearly knocked the lamp off his nightstand in an effort to pick up his phone. His heart raced,  _ Adam again? Another body? Another crisis? _ , only for the sudden fire in his stomach to be extinguished by the sight of his brother’s name on the screen.

Declan’s voice on the other end was a wash of cold water.

“What the actual fuck is wrong with you?”

“I don’t know, man, sometimes I think my jaw is a little crooked.”

It wasn’t and they both knew that. But it was still dark outside the window of Ronan’s bedroom and Ronan figured he did not need to attempt patience until the sun rose.

“Jesus Mary, Ronan.” Declan was using his particular clipped tone where every word was a separate admonishment against Ronan’s general character. “I heard the tip you left for the police last night. You think you can just distort your voice and I wouldn’t recognize it?”

“I mean, yeah, that’s the point of distortion.”

“Okay.” From Declan’s sigh, Ronan knew he was pinching the bridge of his nose in a perfect imitation of a man at his wit’s end. He could see it so well in his mind’s eye because for months after their father’s death, it was the only way he could stand looking at Declan without wanting to slam a fist into the side of his head. “Listen, I don’t know how you knew about the body but do not get involved. It’s being handled.”

“Right. The police are so good at handling cases.”

There was silence. His intended mark hit perfectly in its simplicity.

“Ronan, please. I don’t want you to have anything to do with this case.”

Generally speaking, Ronan’s knee-jerk reaction was to do the exact opposite of Declan’s wishes. Declan had once said, “I don’t want you to do anything impulsive. Nothing with permanent consequences,” and then Ronan dropped nearly a thousand dollars on an extensive back tattoo.

But this wasn’t something as simple as Declan being overbearing about something inconsequential. Ronan didn’t want anything to do with this case either. His relationship with Declan had improved since their volatile years after their father’s death, but he was still unwilling to let this slide without friction.

“Fuck you,” he settled on. Then, “Is Mass still happening?”

“No.” Declan reverted back to business, his abrupt change reflecting collared shirts and scheduled deadlines. “I’m picking up Matthew for the 10 AM Mass at St. Raphael’s. Father Cillian wanted to just rope off the garden and keep the front entrance open in this ‘trying time,’ but the police don’t want any part of the scene trampled or tampered with in any way. There was a general email sent out last night that the church is closed, but no details were given about the murder. Word hasn’t gotten out.”

The  _ yet _ hung in the air like a physical presence and Ronan knew the truth of it. It was a brutal murder in a quiet town and the dead man was the mayor’s son. This would spread like wildfire on a dry day. It hadn’t been twelve hours and Declan was already aware of how the scene of the crime was being treated, already in contact with the church. He wondered if anyone else would know Adam had found the body. He wondered if the police had contacted Adam. He wondered how Adam had slept last night.

“So is the apartment above the church open?”

“What on God’s good earth are you talking about?”

“The guy who lives in that apartment probably needs stuff from it.”

“Is that why you were there last night?” Declan’s implication hung heavily in the air. Ronan had been out to his brothers for several years now, but the inherent embarrassment of being known in this way by Declan was still moderately paralyzing.

“Fuck you,” Ronan said again.

“You’re not very original this morning.” Declan skated on the edge of amusement and for a moment Ronan remembered a flash of Declan’s older brotherly humor from before their father died.

It was this reminder that prompted him to answer instead of falling into his usual silence.

“I know him from the café. He’s the one who found the body.”

“And he, what? Called  _ you _ ?” The unspoken sentiment landed somewhere close to  _ “Who in their right mind would consider you to be a helpful resource?” _

Ronan picked at a loose thread in his comforter, sudden irritation at discussing  _ any _ of this with Declan made him yank the thread until it broke with a satisfying  _ snap _ .

“He needs his stuff,” he muttered to the broken thread in between his fingers.

“I can’t let you pick stuff up for him.” A pause. “I’ll see what I can do.”

The brothers hung up, and the dark, silence of the room pressed against Ronan’s skin. A glance at the clock told him there was no point to getting any more sleep. So he laid in bed, the euphoria from the dream long since turned to ashen shame in his mouth, until his alarm went off and he rose to feed the chickens.

* * *

St. Raphael’s, in Ronan’s opinion, paled in comparison to St. Agnes in every way.

It was an ostentatious show of generic Catholicism, a church housed in a basic brick building that may have originated as a children’s elementary school if the factory-made archway entrance and commercial walls were any indicator. There was a gaudy plastic sign out front where someone with a bad sense of humor and worse spelling had left the message  _ TOMOROW’S FORCAST: GOD REIGNS AND THE SON SHINES _ . Ronan could not abide puns of this nature and glared hatefully at the sign as he passed it.

Chatty church goers instinctively moved to give Ronan a wide berth. Though as a promise to Matthew, he came to church each week in an oppressively acceptable button-down shirt and oppressively respectable slacks, others in attendance still readily moved from his path with the occasional furtive glance or worried expression as though they could still see the leather jacket, the midnight boots, the raven on his shoulder. He kept his own expression to himself as he moved past the chatter, past the cluttered bulletin board boosting babysitters and lost items, through the narthex to the nave. The holy water was cool on his fingers and skin as he dabbed himself with the sign of the cross.

The interior of the church was a further insult to St. Agnes. Where St. Agnes had simple wooden carvings of the twelve stations of the cross adorning the walls between stained glass windows, St. Raphael’s offered life-sized, elaborated painted statues of common saints. The walls were adorned with wood panelling, the ceiling pointed and plain. Musty green carpet was barely an improvement over the wooden floors turned yellow from the lacquer, and above the altar was a large and simple wooden cross hanging from the ceiling with plainly visible wiring. Everything was wood veneer and cheap fabric, streamlined and conventional into something too tame to be offensive, too bland to be desirous.

Really, the only improvement St. Raphael’s had over St. Agnes is that it had not been the scene of a particularly gruesome murder in the last 24 hours.

Catching sight of his brothers’ curled hair, Declan’s a burnished hickory and Matthew’s a polished gold, Ronan walked over and felt his footsteps disappear into the thin carpet. He genuflected with the sign of the cross again before entering the pew, immediately settling himself to the extended cushion to kneel for prayer.

He was too unsettled by this change in scenery to do little more than mentally prattle off  _ Our Father _ before sitting back on the pew, kicking the cushion back into its upright position. Matthew’s shoulder leaned into his companionably.

“Hey pal.” Matthew was all warm words and honeyed smile as he greeted Ronan. Just beyond Matthew’s curls, Ronan saw the corner of Declan’s mouth quirk at the word “pal.”

“Is there anything you want to tell me about?”

Immune to Ronan’s irritation, Matthew exploded with his signature grin. “God, you sound like Mom sometimes.”

Both Declan and Ronan exchanged a glance. Ronan did not sound at all like their mother, but Mass was the only place any of the brothers would talk about her. Ronan sometimes wondered if the only reason Matthew made these outlandish comparisons was to hear a Lynch mention her name out loud.

Brushing past this impatiently, Ronan rolled his eyes and reminded him, “The chicken coop.”

“What about it?”

Matthew’s face was the picture dictionary definition of confusion.

“You didn’t lock it up last night.”

Now his face was the picture dictionary definition of heightened concern.

“Are my girls okay?”

“Yeah, those monsters are fine,” Ronan scowled. “But after the lambs, I really didn’t want to chase any more animals this week. They’re too dumb to go far, but a fox nearly got in.”

Ronan raised an arm and, with his other hand, deftly flicked open the button holding his sleeve together at his wrist. He yanked down the fabric just enough to show deep scratches running parallel to the raised veins in his arms. This wasn’t the first time he had chased that fox and he swore it was going to be the death of him.

“Ronan.” Matthew looked chastened and sincere, his blue eyes locked on the sight where two particularly red scratches intersected with casual brutality. “I swear I locked it up.”

“Guys,” Declan broke in, finally having enough of this. “Church is not the place for this.”

“Church is the perfect place for swearing, Declan,” Matthew protested, but allowed his voice to drop to a whisper.

Ronan did not look at either of them, just settled the sleeve back into place and refused to button it up. Matthew reached over, clumsily fixing it for him before patting him on the shoulder in contrition.

The annoying chatter around them disappeared from the white noise as the priest and ministers strode down the aisle, silence trailing behind in invisible waves. The priest bowed to the ministers in a smooth movement before venerating the altar with a kiss.

“In the name of the Father, and of the Son, and of the Holy Spirit.”

Ronan stared at the precariously balanced cross hovering above the priest through the majority of the Liturgy. His eyes usually lingered heavenward during Mass and he missed his usual view of St. Agnes’s pillars leading up into towering arches spanning the width of the ceiling. When he had been small, carted to church each week by his mother and father, he would imagine himself as Spiderman, crawling up the pillars in some high-stakes mission to protect the congregation from an unidentifiable threat from above. He had imagined his mother’s tearful face as she worried for her son from her spot on the ground, his father’s pride, Declan’s jealousy, Matthew’s adoration, and the faceless many impressed by his skill and grateful for his heroism.

He no longer had such ideations of himself and his ability to save anyone, but his gaze remained upwards.

And as the father spoke beatifically of the angel admonishing the man for adoring him, that he should rather adore the lord the angel served, Ronan thought of Adam. His mind did not allow him to linger on the spear in Adam’s hands or the pain radiating gloriously through his body, but instead focused on Adam’s face. His clothes. The way he held himself.

Across the pew some paces ahead, St. Peter watched Ronan as his mind settled on the memory of Adam’s faint freckles and how they had lit up from the flame of the spear as tiny spots of shine across his skin.

The Adam in the dream wasn’t the Adam he knew at Aglionby, reduced and bruised and so thoroughly uncomfortable in his uniform. He was the Adam Ronan knew serving coffee politely at the café, waiting for people to turn away before his eyes slid to disdainful. He was the Adam Ronan saw biking around town with his ambitiously-filled messenger bag studiously ignoring Ronan’s car and any other car too shiny, too candy-colored, too moneyed. He was still wiry, still something boyish in his elegant features, but he was older now. More certain in his skin, if not more comfortable.

But this Adam too was somehow different in the light of the dream, lacking the weight on his shoulders he usually carried and missing the elegant dismissal in his movements usually directed at Ronan. This third Adam was made of light, and Ronan wanted to bring that light to this world.

These thoughts carried him through Mass and when he stood before the priest for communion, he crossed his arms over his chest and closed his eyes. In the darkness, he saw a piercing fire.

_ Oh, my God, I am sorry for my sins with all my heart. _

* * *

_ Monday, October 9 _

Blue typically met with Noah at the top of the hill at the base of town to walk to work together on mornings when their schedules aligned. Adam knew this was several blocks out of the way for Noah, but knew also that he remained at the cross-section of the roads faithfully every scheduled morning, waiting patiently for Blue.

Today was the same, but for the unusual addition of Adam to their gray morning walk. Noah appeared both pleased and surprised when he looked up from his phone, leaning tiredly against the street sign with his skateboard under his arm, to see both of them walking over to him. His pale, thin lips stretched into a smile and he dipped backwards to rest against the metal pole so he could look at them through his nearly invisible eyelashes.

“Did you guys have a sleepover without me?”

Adam wasn’t sure if he could call two nearly sleepless nights riddled with images of horror scenes and crawling anxiety “sleepovers,” so he said nothing. Though, they had eaten popcorn while watching terrible reality tv with Orla the night before, so he supposed at least one sleepover requirement could have been crossed off the list. He didn’t say that either, though.

Noah, in that peculiar way of his, seemed to catch on very quickly that something was wrong.

“Adam.” He slipped his phone back into his pocket and kicked off from the sign to move closer and peer owlishly into Adam’s eyes. “You don’t look so good.”

Adam opened his mouth and found the words gone from his mouth. The idea of going through this a third time after explaining it to Blue on Saturday and the police on Sunday was exhausting. Blue understood the gape of his mouth immediately and kindly tugged on his hand.

“Let me.”

Adam’s immediate reaction was to refuse her offer, but her hand was warm in his and he could feel the power in her grip as she squeezed his fingers. She was giving him the strength to accept, he realized. He squeezed back, not as strong but still as intentional, and let her explain to Noah.

Blue was a dutiful news reporter, careful to keep the explanation as close to Adam’s account as possible. He recognized exact phrases he had used Saturday night in her retelling and let himself relax a little. He was immensely grateful to Blue for not sensationalizing the discovery of Tad’s body, for not using this retelling to Noah as a cruel facsimile to whisper down the lane.

But even as they descended down the hill and let themselves be claimed by the thick fog around them, Adam felt the same weight in his bones that had taken residency since that first moment in the garden. Every time he blinked, he was there again, reliving the same moment. With no difficulty, he saw the unnatural stillness in the extremities, the slick of blood, the terrifying open gash in high definition gore.

“Adam?”

Blue sounded far away. She stood on his unhearing side, always careful to leave his good ear on the open side of the walks so he could hear any approaching person on the street. Normally he was grateful for her thoughtfulness, but now the further away she sounded, the stronger the adrenaline rushed through him.

“Adam, I’m worried about you.”

Adam was no stranger to the look in Blue’s wet eyes. He had seen it shining at him many times since they had become friends in high school, but rarely did the weight of it settle so heavily on his chest as it did now. He could not look at her, but kept his hand in hers even as he hated himself for drawing this comfort.

“Try not to think about it so much,” Noah added, attempting helpfulness.

“Easier said than done.”

“I know. I’m sorry.” Noah’s head ducked down a little shamefully. “That’s not very helpful, but that’s all I’ve got.”

Blue’s hand tightened around his fingers, but this felt less comforting and more reproachful. Adam hated himself for worrying Blue, hated himself for not being kinder in the face of Noah’s concern.

“No, you’re right,” he sighed, but he was cut off from any further comment when his phone began buzzing with an incoming call.

“God, it’s not even 6 AM. Who is it?”

Adam automatically pulled the phone from his pocket, not sure who he was expecting to see appear on the screen. He showed Blue and Noah the  _ Unknown Caller _ across his screen.

“Scam,” Blue immediately diagnosed, all curiosity dropped from her face as she waved his phone away. “Ignore it.”

“It might be a client from the shop,” Adam protested, even as he continued staring at the screen. “Sometimes Boyd doesn’t feel like talking to them and just sends them my way.”

Adam could practically feel the speech building up on Blue’s tongue about the insensitivity of Boyd to give out Adam’s personal number and the unrealistic expectations clients had to demand Adam’s attention at any hour of the day, and he quickly swiped the call open.

“Hello?”

The other end was silent.

“Hello?”

It was not the blank silence of a machine that had called. There was weight to it, Adam was certain someone was on the other end though he could discern no identifiable sound.

“Hello?” he said a third time.

There was a click, then the anonymous silence of an empty line.

“Told you,” Blue said brattily, pushing at him with a bony shoulder as he tucked his phone away. “Scammer. We get them all the time at Fox Way.”

Then she pulled Adam a little closer, moving her hand to his bicep. She grabbed at Noah, too, pulling him to her other side, and the three of them continued walking as a strangely huddled six-legged monster the entire way to the Busy Bee Café. They laughed and teased, and when they entered the café in a tangle of limbs, Henry’s fond laughter mingled seamlessly with theirs.

But Adam still could not stop thinking about the body.

* * *

If Noah was anyone else in the world, Adam assumed Colin Greenmantle would have caught him staring ages ago. But, like most people, Colin Greenmantle was too caught up in being  _ Colin Greenmantle _ to notice Noah’s eerie stare. He stood now behind the counter, watching Greenmantle at his usual table by the outlet with his laptop plugged in and glowing up onto his face in a way that caught on the edge of his long nose. Henry stood beside, patient as a saint, taking the bulk of Greenmantle’s attention. He was the type of customer who preferred to speak directly with the proprietor of the shop, people deemed interesting and successful, rather than waste time on the baristas. Henry took this in stride, nodding sagely every time Greenmantle divulged another detail of his upcoming book with a grand sweep of his hands.

“I can’t wait for his book to get published,” Noah sighed, leaning his cheek a little more heavily onto his fist propped up on the counter.

“Ew, why?”

Blue was on the customers’ side of the counter, bussing recently vacated tables. She gave Noah her best scrunched face at the idea of Greenmantle’s book being something to look forward to. The look was lost to Noah, still staring at Greenmantle, but the sight of it made Adam smirk to himself as he wiped down the register.

“I can’t wait to read it,” Noah sighed again, this time a little dreamily. “It’s gonna be so bad.”

Then he immediately perked up, pulling his head up from his fist and looking at Blue with renewed excitement in his pale eyes. “Ooh, read it with me? We can have a book club.”

“Like I’d waste the money.”

“Come on, you know it’ll be awful,” Noah whined a little. “Bluuuue.”

“Exactly,” she said scathingly, even as she moved to the next table to clear it off. She shook her head so vigorously, the two tiny space buns she had barely managed to twist at the top of her head threatened to come undone. “I don’t need to read about some self-insert witty spy character white dude misogynistically seduce his way through some icy Western European nation in order to stop some jewel thieves or an art heist as a way to distract himself from his bummer of a life because he’s still mourning the death of his fridged wife, aka his high school sweetheart he married immediately after graduation because he needed a woman to be his stand-in mommy.”

She hadn’t managed to say the entire paragraph in one sentence, but Adam was still impressed she had only stopped once for breath.

“I mean,” Noah blinked thoughtfully, “it could be a self-insert white dude who misogynistically bangs his way through New York City in his quest to find the meaning of life. I bet the character is a novelist, too.”

He nodded as though that settled it before turning his attention to Adam with the same bright interest he had shared with Blue. “Anyway, how about you, Adam? You’ll read it with me?”

Adam thought of the stack of books waiting for him back at his apartment that he wasn’t allowed access to. He thought about the PDFs saved on his computer for the rest of the semester. He thought about the books Gansey had recommended to him, about the history of salt and journals of travelers from centuries past and biographies of dead Welsh kings. He thought about the books he heard about in passing that sounded interesting, books about cars and religion and cities that weren’t Henrietta. Adam did not have time to read some as indulgent as a bad book.

He said none of this, remembering Blue’s arm in his and Noah’s laugh as they had walked through the door just a few hours ago.

“Sorry,” he said instead, “I’m only interested in books where the guy misogynistically bangs his way through a dystopian future where he has to save the world.”

“Oh god, that’s probably it,” Blue moaned. With an annoyed grunt, she gathered the dirty plates from the table and came back behind the counter before disappearing back to the kitchen.

As Adam continued moving down the coulter, wiping drips of coffee and scatters of sugar crystals, Henry’s sympathetic voice floated into his good ear.

“Yes,” he agreed with whatever it was Greenmantle had just said. “Death is inevitable. Would you like another coffee?”

“Hmm?” Greenmantle said distractedly, glancing up from his screen to see Henry gesture to the coffee pot he had been holding in his hand for the better part of ten minutes while he stood there listening politely. “Oh, yeah, sure.”

Suddenly, the door flew open with such a startle that Adam instinctively raised his hands to his face, flinching as the wet rag in his hand smacked against his chin and brought the sharp scent of disinfectant close to his nose.

When he removed his hands, he ignored Noah’s eyes on him and instead saw a blonde woman standing in the doorway in what looked like a power stance she might have learned in a Ted Talk. Blonde hair was piled on top of her head in a picture-perfect messy bun, her baby pink peacoat cinched attractively at her trim waist and the hot pink yoga mat looked like a deadly weapon under her arm.

“Colin!”

With a dramatic pull of the enormously round sunglasses off her face, Piper Greenmantle’s expression revealed a passive aggressiveness so sweet it would have given Henry’s pastries a run for their money.

“Darling,” Greenmantle greeted with a nod of his head, unphased by this movie star entrance. This lack of what she deemed an appropriate response to her sudden appearance only seemed to further infuriate her.

“I  _ thought _ you were going to be at the house. The  _ men _ were coming today.”

“Men?”

“I  _ told _ you. Men were coming to take your DNA or test your blood or something else gross and scientific. You  _ promised _ you’d be there. I just got the call during my yoga class that you weren’t there when you  _ promised _ me you would be there. Pumpkin Spice Latte.”

She spoke so rapidly, it was no surprise Henry did not immediately react to her order. After a beat, she seemed to pick up on this and turned to actually look at Henry.

“Oh, right,  _ please _ ,” she added with a roll of her eyes. “If it’s too hot though, don’t even bother. My nutritionist wants me to avoid intense temperature changes since it might upset my intestinal balance.”

Henry beamed at her with a sincerity that Adam found difficult to look at straight on.

“I love this job. I learn something new every day.” He said this in a way meant to flatter her, but made its true meaning clear to Adam and Noah. Then he inclined his head at her dutifully, eyebrows raised with great interest. “For here or to go?”

Both Greenmantles said “To go” at the same time, which of course led to further difficulty on Piper’s part.

“Oh,” she pulled out the syllable like taffy, “ _ now _ you want to go?” She gave Greenmantle a scathing look with her perfectly applied eyeliner. Then she turned his attention back to Henry and said both primly and demandingly, “I’ll have it here.”

Henry made an honest to God bow to her and left her to join her scowling husband at his tiny table meant for only aspiring authors and their laptops. He came back around the counter where Adam was already prepping the Pumpkin Spice Latte for Henry. Adam, Henry, and Noah all very carefully avoided eye contact with one another until Adam finished and handed the drink to Henry. Henry made a big show of garnishing her drink with cinnamon and nutmeg before extending the mug to her graciously.

She took the mug and had nearly brought it to her pink-lacquered lips before pulling it away to scrutinize it.

“This is Farm Fresh, right?”

“Yes, ma’am.” Henry nodded proudly.

She flinched at the word  _ ma’am _ , but otherwise nodded enthusiastically.

“It’s so good to give back to the community,” she simpered. One look at the self-aggrandizing look on her face told Adam she considered herself a better type of person for shopping local. At one time, this behavior had irritated him, but now he figured self-righteous money paid his tips as well as any other type.

Piper took another congratulatory sip of her latte and turned her pretty shark’s smile at her husband. “So good of my husband to come here everyday for hours and work on, oh, what’s that? Another game of solitaire, honey?”

Greenmantle did not even bother to move the screen away from his wife’s prying eyes, the added insult clearly not lost to her.

“It’s just so hard to focus with your lovely voice in my ear, dearest,” he said, just as falsely sweet.

Henry turned to Adam, Noah, and Blue who had just returned from the kitchen to witness this grotesque display and whispered under his breath conspiratorially.

“They’re gonna go home and screw, right? Like, that’s the vibe you guys are getting here, too, right?”

They all nodded.

“Is it bad that I want to read his novel?” Henry said, his voice as wistful as Noah’s had been just minutes ago. “He just told me all about it and I swear on Madonna I couldn’t tell you a blessed thing about it. But god, it’ll be such good trash. I mean, we won’t be able to say we know an author, per say, but we can say we know someone who published a book. Should we start a bet on what it’s about? My money is on murder mystery. A bloody thriller that can only be solved by the jaded private investigator who quit his job as a police officer after the brutal murder of his wife.”

Thank God for Henry’s sheer inability to see beyond his own glow because he missed the pointed and worried looks Blue and Noah not-so covertly shot at Adam.

“I’m fine,” he muttered to them, brushing off their concern.

But as soon as the latest batch of pumpkin scones dinged to announce they were ready to be taken from the oven, Adam immediately volunteered to take them out. With the scones safely extracted and smelling strongly of warm pumpkin and cinnamon, Adam dug out his phone from his apron to text Ronan.

**8:52 Adam  
** _ When you shut your eyes, do you still see it? _

As soon as he sent the text, he realized how cryptic it must read. He had not seen, spoken, or texted Ronan since he had dropped him off at Blue’s house Friday night with a sarcastic comment about not letting the bed bugs bite. He had just wanted to know he wasn’t alone in this, wasn’t the only one who could not look at anything dark and wet without wanting to violently gag. Before he could send another text to clarify, Ronan immediately responded.

**8:53 Ronan  
** _ dramatic bitch _

He went back to the counter, letting himself get distracted by Blue’s friendly chatter with the customers as he set about making more drinks. A few minutes later, he felt the familiar buzz of his phone in his apron and curiosity got the better of him. He pulled his phone out and saw another text from Ronan flash on the screen.

**8:59 Ronan  
** _ yes _

* * *

Twenty minutes and seven orders later, the bell jingled again and Adam was surprised to see Ronan at the door, backpack slung over one shoulder and Chainsaw regally perched on the other. Ronan’s eyes were already on him when he met his gaze, but Henry spoke before anyone else could get a word in edgewise.

“Ronan! What is this, three times in one week?” He did not wait for a response but prattled on. Ronan kept his eyes on Adam as Henry continued with the heavy sigh of the long suffering. “I suppose this is the price I must pay to see my darling Chainsaw.”

He peered around Ronan as though a large raven was not enough of an accompanying guest. “No Ganseyman today?” he queried, and Adam thought he could hear a strain of disappointment hidden under his piqued interest.

“No.”

All heads turned to Blue who seemed to immediately catch her own mistake. She did not blush, but the ferocity with which she adjusted one of the many clips holding up her hair gave her away. When she spoke again, it was with her nose a little higher in the air and a forced nonchalance, like it was nothing for anyone to comment about that she was privy to information about Gansey that the rest of them had not known.

“He’s holed up in his museum, trying to get his text panels done in time for the Harvest Festival.”

“How’d you know that?”

Blue waved off Adam’s bewildered suspicion, bustling behind the counter. He saw her attempt to clean the countertops, a standard distraction task, only to be disappointed by Adam’s thorough sweep.

“Gansey just texted me about it yesterday.” She glared at the counter like a mess should have appeared out of pity. “Forget it.”

Adam remembered sitting with her on the couch the night before while they watched Orla’s horrendous reality show with a sort of detached amazement. She had tossed a blanket stitched together with the ends of yarns from different projects, its fields multicolored and without pattern, over the both of them. With her back propped up by a round cherry red pillow against the arm of the couch, she kept her socked feet tucked under his thigh. Throughout the night, he had felt her toes occasionally scrunch up and he would look over to see her smiling down at her phone.

Now, her head was ducked away making Ronan’s drink so he could not see now if she was smiling, though Noah certainly was. But it was Henry’s face that caught Adam’s eye the most, something in his dark eyes trained on the curve of her cheek Blue allowed him to see.

Chainsaw, clearly displeased attention was on someone else small, dark, and spiky, immediately let out a squawk to remind everyone she was there. Several of the customers looked at her with alarm before giving Henry a dark expression for allowing her to stay. Adam could see Colin Greenmantle was one of them. Piper, surprisingly enough, was not.

“You know,” Adam drawled in his usual offhand way when it came to Chainsaw, “it’s bad enough when you come here before we’re open with your bird.”

“She missed you, Parrish,” Ronan said, his voice too knifelike to ever truly achieve a syrupy quality. “Have a heart.”

Rather than respond, Adam moved into Blue’s space where she was making Ronan’s drink and jostled her out of the way with his hip. She made a displeased noise that aborted halfway in her throat as she watched him add shots of the pumpkin spice flavor into Ronan’s signature large cold brew with three shots. Her sprite smile lit up her face.

Adam spent a split second deciding if he wanted to forgo the customary addition of cinnamon sprinkled on top so that Ronan wouldn’t be tipped off before he took a drink or if his urgent need to finish a job to its true completion would overtake him. Shaking his head just a little, he stomped down the compulsion and handed the drink to Ronan.

Ronan eyed it carefully, taking it from Adam with the pad of one fingertip nudging against his hand unintentionally.

“Did you spit in it?”

“No, that’s Blue’s job.”

The idea of spitting in Ronan’s drink seemed less like a joke if it came from him. They both seemed to understand this even as they spoke and Adam hated himself for looking away first. From the corner of his eye, Adam watched as Ronan shifted his stance to take in Noah, Blue, and Henry all blatantly focused on him. He brought the cup to his mouth with the raise of a single eyebrow.

“Why are you all staring at me?”

“How’s your abomination?” Henry asked eagerly. His perfectly spiked hair shook with anticipation.

“Fine?” Ronan sniffed at the drink before pulling back to eye it suspiciously. “Did you actually spit in this drink?”

“It’s pumpkin spice.”

Adam had waited until the exact moment Ronan had shrugged and taken another sip of coffee to tell him this. The response wasn’t exactly a spit take, Adam hadn’t expected something so cartoonish from dark and brooding Ronan. But the watery snort of coffee up the nose did deliver particular satisfaction.

“Damnit,” Ronan let out on a sigh, “this actually isn’t terrible.”

His eyes caught and held Adam’s over the rim of the cup and any semblance of normalcy that brought Adam was quickly shattered by Piper Greenmantle standing abruptly from her seat.

“Oh my god! Did you hear? Mayor Carrauthers’s son was killed last night! God, it’s  _ gruesome _ !”

She sounded as gleeful as a child. Immediately, the room broke out into rapid conversations. The café was not crowded on a Monday mid-morning, but the voices filled the air around Adam in a way that made him certain he was suffocating. A small cluster of people formed around Piper who waved her phone around like a beacon to the vultures. Mass speculation sprang up,  _ what happened, who did this, where was he found, is anyone else dead? _ On Ronan’s shoulder, Chainsaw fluttered so terribly with the commotion that he immediately took her outside.

Adam could feel Noah and Blue’s eyes on him, but he busied himself with the customer who wanted a caramel macchiato refill before settling into further fascination with Piper’s new cohort. He walked himself through the process as though it was his first day on the job all over again, Henry guiding him through each step with a level of patience and good humor he had not expected. He let the ease of familiarity carry him behind the counter as he filled a fresh mug and blocked the noise from his hearing ear. Adam had not been a stranger to pushing himself through uncomfortable situations for many years, he would not be undone by this.

As he handed the mug to the customer who stole away without any modicum of politeness, Ronan stood off to the side. He had reentered while Adam had his back turned and had settled against the wall opposite of the crowd around the Greenmantles. The room had felt so askew with nearly every customer on one side of the room, but the weight of Ronan’s insistent presence brought balance back.

His eyes met Adam’s.

“Take a break.”

The ease at which he suggested this made the anger flare up in Adam just enough to bring heat back to his frozen fingertips.

“I don’t get a break.” Adam was too tired to go over the basics of workplace protocol with someone who thought it was acceptable to bring a bird into a place that serves food.

“Your boss sounds like an asshole. Take a break. Stick it to the man.”

Adam let the protest die on his lips as he felt Noah’s fingers ghost on his shoulder. He looked at his pale friend, similarly withdrawn and subdued with all this chatter, and saw Noah nod his head in the direction of the customers he and Blue clearly had under control. When he turned around, Ronan was already slipping into the back kitchen. Adam caught only the sight of expensive jeans and the sole of a scuffed black boot before it was hidden behind the swing of the chrome and teal door.

He followed closely behind. When the kitchen door shut behind him, it did not eliminate all noise from the front of the café, but it dulled the conversations to a soft, indistinguishable pile of voices.

A few paces ahead Ronan had tossed his backpack on the ground and was not looking at Adam, but at the scones cooling off on the novelty bumblebee cooling racks Henry insisted on. Adam had several times over pointed out commercial grade cooling racks in industrial magazines that occasionally found their way to the Busy Bee Café, but Henry was nothing if not insistent on whimsy.

“They’ve been talking about it around town. I haven’t heard anyone say your name.”

Adam let Ronan’s words settle down around him for a long moment, the implications of his words placating some trashing piece inside him. He had spent so much of his life being quiet, he wanted this to be the same, too.

“That’s…” He cast about for a word before settling on something close enough, “good.”

Ronan seemed to understand the word and its proximity to the truth and the steps Adam had not been able to take to cross the two. Adam realized if no one tagged his name to the scene, then Ronan was surely in the clear as well. Ronan was infinitely more recognizable than Adam. He was recognizable from his loud car ripping through the streets, from his savage handsomeness snagging faces as he passed, from his raven flying through the sky like some wild thing only to perch on his shoulder like a demon come to rest.

Ronan pulled a long drink from his coffee cup in a way that made him look like a polished commercial for some new dark roast before it was drained. Adam watched its arched flight pattern from Ronan’s loose hand to the garbage can, neatly avoiding the edges.

“I can’t believe you actually drank it.”

Ronan shrugged with a scowl and Adam was once again impressed with the range of emotions Ronan could display at any one moment.

“It’s good.”

“I can’t believe you’d actually admit it.”

“I don’t lie.” Then, with a groan as he leaned against the wall covered in laminated charts converting baking measurements. “I hate that I like this.”

He looked at Adam, his head obscuring the chart detailing teaspoons to tablespoons, and Adam found himself grinning.

“This opens up a whole new flavor palette for you.”

“Good, that’s what’s been missing from my life.”

Adam let out a single huff of air that might have been a laugh on a different day. Leaning away, he stretched to the closest cooling rack and pulled a pumpkin scone from the grid. It was still warm in his hands as he held it out. Ronan did not push himself off the wall, but extended his arm out to its full length. Again, Adam felt the trace of his fingers against his own as Ronan took the scone from his grip.

“You know, you didn’t have to come just because I texted you. I’m fine, really.”

Ronan looked at him peculiarly over the top of his half-finished pastry. A smirk spread slowly over his sharp face.

"What makes you think I’m here for you?”

Ronan slouched over to pick up his backpack on the floor. 

“Noah and I are gonna skateboard,” he explained like one might to a child, sliding the zipper over to show the skateboard shoved in with a mess of papers that could only have been shredded by a raven.

With no small degree of pleasure at the sight of Adam’s surely surprised face, Ronan shoved the rest of the scone into his mouth messily and walked out the door, pushing at Adam’s shoulder a little as he passed.

Every time, Adam thought, he thought he understood some new part of Ronan, Ronan had to go ahead and ruin it in the same breath.

“Asshole,” he almost laughed to the remaining scones before turning around and returning to work.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Mutatis mutandis = Latin phrase that literally means "that having been changed which had to be changed" and is commonly translated as "with the necessary changes."
> 
> The statue featured in the graphic is The Ecstasy of St. Teresa. Ronan's whole sex dream is actually based heavily on the ecstasy of St. Teresa. Not sure how familiar you all are with orgasms in the Catholic Church, but basically there is a subsect of female saints who had visions of being pieced by angels/God and had a physical reaction so strong that they forgot the world around them/went numb/were said to have floated.
> 
> Ah yes, another chapter of horror, murder, and... scones. This chapter inspired me to make scones this weekend and it was a lovely decision. Hope you all enjoyed this chapter!


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